thePlatform

When Discovery Engines Start Acting Human

Written By: Yosi Glick

How content is traditionally recommened

Once video content providers realized that conventional guides weren’t a compelling tool for persuading online viewers to seek out their favorite content, they started adding recommendations alongside the standard title listings. At first, these recommendations were either manually selected ‘Editor’s picks’ or ‘New this week’ titles. This option certainly helped people navigate the sea of choices, but it was an adequate solution at best.

Other recommendation enhancements were later implemented in the guide, such as allowing viewers to tell the guide about their personal tastes (e.g., I like comedies, thrillers or documentaries). Other early enhancements incorporated consumption data to make recommendations seem a bit more personal.

Still ‘Nothing to watch’

These recommendation sets are great for viewers who happen to be in the mood to watch one of the latest blockbusters or whose taste is similar to the editor’s. Nevertheless, many users continue to be frustrated that, despite having an enormous catalog of available content, there is still ‘nothing to watch’. Why? Because the guide itself is too focused on the cataloguing needs of the content managers instead of the viewers’ real preferences.

Why traditional models fail

The problem comes down to the decisioning methods used by a traditional catalog model. Content-to-content algorithms called collaborative filtering (‘if you liked X, you may like Y’) have been widely deployed to power recommendation baskets. Collaborative filtering seems to work well in a retail setting, where consumers who bought an iPad may also want to buy a related item, such as an iPad case. But attempts to apply this technique to video consumption produce awkward and confusing recommendations based on statistical correlation, not real similarity. Video consumers want to be shown similar titles, but collaborative filtering is unable to meet this need because it operates in a ‘blind’ mode and lacks meaningful information about the titles it recommends.

When the discovery engine starts acting human

The goal of the video guide should be to give viewers a fun and enjoyable way to quickly find something they want to watch. When people sit down in front of their TV (or any other connected media device) they want to find a program that suits their tastes and mood – right then and there! In order for the guide to enable that, it must make precise recommendations so the viewer can discover the right content.

But creating this type of “discovery-oriented” guide requires rich, accurate information to describe titles in the same way that people would describe TV shows and movies to one another. In other words, the guide must think and communicate like a person and be able to make recommendations based on the viewer’s mood.

Viewers can be in either a passive or active mode. In the passive mode they want to stay safe within their comfort zone and would therefore appreciate recommendations that are similar to their favorite TV shows and movies. A semantic engine can do this well because it understands each piece of content and the user’s tastes so it can then make a perfect match.

When a viewer is in a more active discovery mode, he may want to explore a wider array of available content. The active user will prefer semantic exploration to find the perfect gem. Already familiar with the natural expressions used to describe content, the semantic discovery engine will serve as a good starting point to seed informed discovery across the entire catalog.

Ongoing use of the discovery enhanced guide reveals insights about how the industry makes movies. In such cases browsing itself becomes an enjoyable, enriching experience.

What’s in store – discovery by mood, plot, style and more

Next generation video guides should offer viewers an intuitive way to browse the catalog according to natural language metaphors. For example, if you are in the mood for something stylized and mind bending, the guide should offer this as a way to slice the catalog. You may drill down into your results even further by selecting one or more plot elements, such as ‘uncover the truth’. Users should be able to explore the guide by terms that make sense to them, not the archive manager.

Discovery process should be transparent

An important part of building the viewer’s trust in the guide is making the process completely transparent. When the system recommends a particular piece of content, it should also offer a completely transparent explanation of why it did so. The system should show the viewer what elements the title has that suit her tastes. For example, Boardwalk Empire may be recommended to someone who likes tense, stylized content about gangsters with criminal heroes.

Discovery-powered guide builds consumption confidence and loyalty

Only a guide that is powered with rich, accurate semantic information about each title in the catalog can succeed at recommending similar titles that viewers find useful. A discovery-oriented guide helps people find content they will enjoy and improves their experience, thereby increasing stickiness and consumption. As viewers get comfortable with the service, the discovery-enhanced guide will become a trusted ‘brand of choice’, and they will happily return again and again because they are confident they will find exactly what they are in the mood to watch.

Yosi Glick is the Co-Founder and President of Jinni.

Product Release: YouTube “Personal” and CMC Connectors

Reaching an audience of 113 Million on YouTube and over 56 Million pay-TV homes just got a whole lot easier.

thePlatform is pleased to announce our latest integration with YouTube and Comcast Media Center (CMC). This opens the doors to a vast audience of viewers who were previously a lot harder to reach. With our new Connectors, you can now expand your video outreach using some of the world’s most popular video outlets.

YouTube currently has over 113 million unique visitors a month*, and CMC currently reaches more than 56 million pay-TV homes. Our latest additions to the mpx Connector family will allow you access to this audience with much greater ease than ever before.

Because these new Connectors remove the need for custom integration to YouTube and CMC, mpx is now even more of a one stop shop, where high video outreach and simple video management are one solution.

You Tube

With the addition of our latest YouTube Connector, we now support all YouTube syndication channels for both personal (User) and commercial (Partner) accounts. Whether you are a small-medium sized business wanting to expand your viewer outreach or a large enterprise with a partner channel, we have you covered.

What’s the difference between User and Partner? A YouTube User channel is basically a free account available to anyone, whereas a YouTube Partner channel is only available to those accepted as a YouTube Partner. The key differences between user and partner channels are the constraints of video length and size, along with ad support. To learn more about their Partner Program, visit YouTube/Partners.

CMC

In addition to reaching websites and mobile devices, you will now be able to use mpx to publish to CMC for the distribution of your VOD content. Our integration with CMC creates a seamless experience for your editors and eliminates duplicate efforts with spreadsheets or other tools, as they are now able to work solely in mpx to manage both your online and VOD content . It’s simple to use: upload your VOD content to the right destination and in the right format. Our Connector logic will then transform our standard XML metadata to the explicit ADI 1.1 format required for the CMC VOD system. Once it is there, CMC handles the rest.

Getting Started

If you are interested in syndicating your content to YouTube or CMC, or any of our other Connectors (MSN, Comcast, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, MobiTV, GoTV, QuickPlay), please contact your Account Manager. You can also learn more about our YouTube Connector and CMC Connector in our Technical Resource Center.

*According to comScore

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thePlatform Awarded for ‘Outstanding Technology Innovation’

We are excited to announce that thePlatform’s mpx video management and publishing system was given an ‘Outstanding Technology Innovation’ award at Videonet’s Connected TV Summit in London. “We’re very honored to receive this prestigious recognition,” said Ian Blaine, CEO of thePlatform. “mpx is the culmination of more than a decade of work, and is now a foundational asset for our customers in Europe, North America, and around the globe. And, since VideoNet is at the forefront of understanding the evolving nature of the video market, it’s particularly meaningful for us to have been selected by them.”

Justin Lebbon, Conference Manager for Connected TV Summit and Publisher of Videonet said: “This is the first Connected TV Awards and we were surprised by the size of the response, with 80 entries across just two categories. The competition was fierce and we congratulate all the winners for their pioneering efforts in this field and thank everyone who entered. There is a huge amount of innovation out there, confirming what an exciting and dynamic segment Connected TV represents.”

Videonet is a leading source of strategic insight, analysis and news about post-convergence television in Europe. The publication explores the challenges and opportunities for the TV industry as it introduces more on-demand content and evolves towards multi-screen delivery and a hybrid broadcast/IP connected TV experience. Videonet operates the website www.v-net.tv and publishes a weekly newsletter that is complemented by ‘show dailies’ from major industry events, and is the official social media partner for IBC and hosted the official IBC blog in 2009 and 2010. Videonet in-depth industry reports (packaged within e-magazines distributed around key exhibitions), webcasts, webinars, video interviews and Blogs provide thought leadership from senior executives across the TV ecosystem.

The awards were decided by a panel of judges, all with extensive knowledge of the Connected TV market. The judges were: Stephen Adshead, Associate, Plum Consulting; Jay Chinnadorai, Managing Director, Sumtotal; Julian Clover, Editorial Director, Broadband TV News; William Cooper, Founder and Chief Executive, informitv; Graham Lovelace, Director, Lovelace Consulting; John Moulding, Editor, Videonet; Martin Olausson, Director of Digital Media Strategy, Strategy Analytics; Ben Schwarz, CEO, CTOi Consulting, and Ian Nock, Principal Consultant, Blackarrow Consulting.

Questions about mpx or our Connected TV solutions? Contact Us today.”

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Product Update: Player Dev Kit 4.4

Enhancements Make for a Simpler, Better Video Player

We are excited to announce the latest updates to our Player Dev Kit (Player Dev Kit 4.4). This release marks a major advancement to our player framework, making it easier to build players and provide a better viewing experience for your end users.

Thanks to the great feedback from our customers, we’ve improved the overall structure of our player code base and removed unnecessary complexities. The result? You now have more flexibility in building a player for any environment.

What Was Changed?

We enhanced the underlying framework in order to make it easier to build players that are optimized for websites, mobile devices, tablets and OTT services. To do this we focused on a few key areas:

• Simplify the code base – Improved to make it easier and faster for you to implement.
• Automatically detect the right device
  • You no longer have to worry about building more than one player or adding in detection logic to your pages. We take care of that for you behind the scenes . Example: If you have an environment that supports Flash, our Flash Player components will render, or if your environment only supports HTML5, such as an iPad, HTML5 player components will automatically render.
  • We now automatically select the best file format for play back, or you can set your preferences through configuration.
• Make the player more SEO friendly – Our new framework and semantically sound code base makes it easier to code and structure your SEO elements within the Any Player page.

These enhancements mark some pretty significant changes to our Player Dev Kit, all of which are well documented in the Player Dev Kit Users Guide. If you have any questions or would like some additional training, please contact our Trainer. We’ll be more than happy to walk you through all of these changes.

What’s Next on Player Dev Kit’s Roadmap?

Soon, the HTML5 player will share the same rich features found on the Flash player, such as Navigation, Category List, the Control Rack, Search, and other plug-ins. Stay tuned for future release information.

To learn more about our latest Player Dev Kit releases, check our Technical Resource Center.

Questions, comments, or suggestions? Feel free to contact us or call your Account Manager.

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Independent Analyst Firm Cites thePlatform as a “Leading Enabler of TV Everywhere” and Cox Selects thePlatform for Newest Subscriber Initiative

At thePlatform, we’re committed to helping our customers bring premium video to their subscribers, or viewers, across any screen. To that end, we’re pleased to share two exciting developments with you, and to be recognized by both an important customer and by Parks Associates.

First, you may have seen news today from Cox about its new Cox TV Online service. We’re very pleased to say that Cox is using our mpx video publishing system to support the new service, expanding upon thePlatform’s history of managing Cox’s video for Cox.net since 2008. This unique implementation enables programming networks to maintain the integrity of embedded custom video players on Cox’s website, while providing Cox subscribers with a unified search and discovery experience. As Ian Blaine noted in our press release today:

“thePlatform developed a smart media management platform that allows each of our customers to approach ‘TV Everywhere’ initiatives in their own way. One of the exciting aspects of this deployment is the ability to present unified content search and discovery across a variety of programmers’ video players. With mpx, Cox subscribers can watch premium video instantly, while the business policies and financial obligations between Cox and programmers are maintained.”

We are honored to support the video efforts of TV service providers around the world, including 5 of the largest TV service providers in North America, along with specific TV Everywhere deployments for Cox, Rogers, and Comcast. We’re also very pleased to have been profiled in Parks Associates’ latest report “TV Everywhere: Growth, Solutions, and Strategies.”

According to Parks Associates, by mid-2011, TV Everywhere services will be available to 81% of U.S. and Canadian pay-TV subscribers through their current service provider. We’re very proud that this new report describes thePlatform as a “leading enabler of TV Everywhere deployments by cable operators in North America.”

The report also highlights our efforts supporting the video efforts of other global TV service providers, and profiles some of our technical capabilities. On a broader level, the report examines the deployments of TV Everywhere initiatives around the world, market-specific approaches, business models, and consumer interest. It also explores the technical, business, and legal issues related to TV Everywhere. So, if your organization is looking for a well-produced research overview, we’d recommend it. And, if you’re interested in hearing more about what thePlatform can do for you, please drop us a line.

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TV Everywhere Only Matters If It’s Personal

Written By: David Maher-Roberts, CEO, The Filter

Consumers these days are driven by content, not by any loyalty to a particular provider or technology. Their favourite videos are what really keep them engaged.

The success of TV Everywhere will clearly be based on people being able to watch the programs they want to watch, when they want to watch them. Consumers have shown that they are willing to pay for TV and video services, and there’s no reason why this will change as long as they can still get high quality and relevant content.

That said, the issue with the “everything, anywhere, anytime” model (regardless of whether it’s OTT or IPTV) is that once you have used the service to watch that must-see movie or that can’t-possibly-miss-it episode of Glee, what do you do next? People frequently experience paralysis brought on by too much choice. We’ve ALL experienced that feeling on one occasion or another.
So what happens next? The majority of us take the easy route and watch what everyone else is watching, undermining the true potential of any multi-device, anytime service. And our inability to navigate and discover new and exciting shows gets worse as providers add more and more content.

Accessibility is of course an issue and one that TV Everywhere is trying to solve, but once you’ve lead the horse to water, how are you going to get it to drink?
Making Content Relevant to the Individual

Unlocking the true power of TV Everywhere requires making search, navigation and discovery interfaces more intelligent, personalized, and, therefore, relevant on all devices. In simple terms, the content services need to work harder so people don’t have to. Content should not be left to chance, not in this day and age when there is so much competition for our time and increasingly our viewing.
In our experience providing relevance platforms with content services for customers like NBC.com, Vudu, Warner Bros and major IPTV services in Europe, the results are industry-standard-busting levels of engagement when compared to non-personalized or editorial recommendations.

Here are some of the principles we use when working with content services on personalization and relevance:

1. Focus on users/demand: mood, context, motivation, content perception. To date, content services focus 80% of time/budget/resources on solving distribution and supply issues, and only 20% on solving the demand issues. This needs to be inverted.
2. Tap into the data exhaust. Connected devices produce large amounts of data. Any content service that wants to provide a more intelligent and personalized viewer experience must log all of the data created by connected devices.
3. Make use of all data types and across all connected devices. Traditional content services usually use only metadata (descriptions, images, trailers, actors, etc) to provide recommendations. These data are important, but a personalized service needs to get more granular and understand what people are consuming at what time on what day and on what device to provide truly relevant, personalized navigation and discovery.
   The different types of data that you need to log and make use of for a more intelligent service include:
   a. Metadata – Descriptions, images, cast members, genre, year, etc…
   b. Context data – Location, device, time of day, day of week, language
   c. Social data – Tweets, friend recommendations, status updates, Likes
   d. Taste – Individual consumption, interaction with content
4. Create and overlay the graphs. We achieve true relevance by using all of theses different data types to create an Item Graph (how the library of content is connected) and a Taste Graph. Overlaying one on top of the other, allowing for different contexts, will deliver the most relevant results.
5. Optimize and measure the effect of each tweak

And finally, a relevance system will not provide the best results if just taken off the shelf and plugged in. It requires ongoing optimization (some human and some machine-learning).

True relevance and personalization will be delivered only by technology that accounts for people’s many tastes – influenced by location, time of day, day of week, the device they are on, what they are doing and who they are with. Delivering content on this level will go a long way in helping TV Everywhere reach its potential.

Learn more about The Filter at www.TheFilter.com.

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mpx Feed Adapters – Custom Feeds Just Got A Lot Easier

Not every video fits the norm. That’s why we’re often are asked to build custom feed formats, such as iTunes, Google, Bing, Boxee, QuickPlay, CSV, etc. Most of these are pretty close to one of our built-in formats, but different enough that they may not fit your requirements right out of the box. Up until now, that was a big problem for content providers, as they would either have to delay publishing their media until it could be configured for a Media RSS, Atom, or JSON feed or until a custom feed format could be made by our development team.

Our new Feed Adapters feature is something we hope will help you get your content out to the masses a lot quicker. It should make your video editors’ lives a lot easier, too.

Let’s take a look under the hood and see exactly how it works.

Feed Adapters allows users to use or create custom feed formats to meet almost any need. You can deliver a feed as a web page, or as CSV data, or in an enhanced feed format like Apple iTunes. This feature is fully integrated into the mpx console and works in tandem with the Feeds Service’s built-in sorting, querying, paging, and caching abilities.

Our Feed Adapter transforms the XML data from your video feed into any other format that can be generated using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT). We chose to use XSLT instead of Groovy (or the like) because it’s easier to modify an existing feed. Writing a feed adapter is a pretty straightforward process but you’ll need a little XSLT knowledge in order to write your own.

Once a Feed Adapter has been created, you can configure any feed for use as a default output format by changing the feed’s Default Feed Format setting in mpx. You can also apply the ‘&form=’ query string parameter to a feed’s Public URL to view it in your specific custom format.

Transform Feeds on the Fly

So what’s changed? Up until now, if we wanted to add one of these formats, it had to go through our core development team. That step took time and limited the number of formats we could add. With that barrier removed, anyone can create an adapter to transform a feed into a new format on the fly.

Here’s an example of a sample feed adapter that takes our Player Dev Kit’s test feed and converts it into an HTML table:

Notice that the system returns the feed in an HTML page.

Just like with any normal feed, the response can be cached and contain very large data sets, and it supports all the normal feed parameters, like range, sorts, queries, templates, etc. You can also write a feed transform that uses parameters passed into the feed at run time.

Out of the Box Adapters Coming Soon

We currently don’t have any default or out of the box feed adapters available, but we plan to in the future. To help you get started, we have handful of samples available on the TRC.

To learn more about writing scripts for feed adapters and to view our sample scripts, see Creating a custom feed adapter. There’s more to come! Our next post will dive deeper into the technical details of constructing a feed adapter.

Questions, comments, or suggestions? Feel free to contact me or your Account Manager.

Partner News - Blog"}

thePlatform Welcomes Five New Partners

With every new partnership comes new opportunity to expand and grow your online video presence. We’re excited to announce five new members of thePlatform’s partner community. We feel that each one not only enhances our technology stack but also gives our customers more avenues to increase viewership, boost ad revenue, measure performance, and much more.

Our open approach to assisting media companies with their online and mobile video initiatives is a major benefit of working with us. We not only have one of the largest collections of pre-integrated partner technologies, we have the right choice of technologies.

Take a look at these five new partners and see how they can enhance your business.

AdoTube

AdoTube offers monetization services through a premium ad network and an overlay ad exchange. They also provide creative services with an award-winning in-house rich media team and empower publishers to sell their own in-stream campaigns or serve in-house messages.

Taboola

Taboola helps increase viewership—and advertising revenues—by enabling websites to offer personalized video recommendations. Taboola uses their own predictive model, called EngageRank™, to determine what users want to see based on the analysis of their viewing engagement. Taboola’s recommendations keep users on our customers’ sites longer and compel them to watch more videos.

Coincident.tv

Coincident TV merges online video, social media, weblinks and commercial transactions to create one immersive experience. The company provides a professional software suite that lets content creators and distributors easily design, manage, and measure interactive video engagements delivered to PCs, iPad™, tablets and mobile devices.

weComm

weComm is a pioneer of the mobile application industry with over 10 years of experience building high quality, media rich mobile applications. weComm enables users to cost-effectively create applications once and deliver them instantly on all kinds of devices from iPhones, iPads, Androids and BlackBerrys to Windows Mobile, Java and Symbian phones.

Mediafly

Mediafly’s technology and device partnerships provide you with actionable metrics on video consumption tailored for smartphones, tablets and Internet-connected TV devices. This enables you to make intelligent, data-driven decisions on how to best leverage video as a primary means for communication and marketing.

New companies join thePlatform’s Partner Program every quarter. We provide full-featured software development kits, engineering support, training, and development sandboxes for a quick implementation. Interested companies should contact us via our online form.

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Creating a Better User Experience—Integrated Support of HTTP Live Streaming

Apple iPhones, iPod Touch, iPad devices—how do you send large amounts of video data to multiple devices over the network and still give the user a great experience? HTTP Live Streaming is one answer.

Why HTTP Live Streaming Matters

Apple’s release of their HTTP Live Streaming adaptive video streaming protocol is a big deal. It provides the advantages of a true video streaming technology but delivered from a standard HTTP server. We followed suit by integrating support for the new technology right into our services.

The great thing about adaptive streaming is that it creates different bandwidth versions and then breaks the content into segments that can be mixed using dynamic stream switching. This lets the user skip forward to any point in the video quickly without having to wait for the entire video to load.

Ready to Get Started?

If you’re using our Remote Media Processor (RMP) versions 2.3.0 or later, HTTP Live Streaming is seamlessly integrated into our hosted transcoding services. We also support it for customers running their own RMP servers with the latest version of Rhozet’s Carbon Coder (version 3.16 or later).

With minimal configuration, you set up an encoding profile using the HTTP Live Streaming presets in our Transcoding Service. You then set up a Publish Profile in mpx that uses that encoding profile.
When you publish to the Publish Profile, the operation creates an HTTP Live Streaming package, generating a full set of segments for each bitrate requested. It also generates the index files (identified by the m3u8 extension) that tell the player what segments and bitrates are available and the files’ locations. During playback, the player decides at the start of each segment which bitrate to deliver based on network conditions.

Keep in mind that if you’re streaming content to these Apple devices, you’ll need to use an HTML5 player, which our Player Dev Kit supports. HTML 5 players built with the Player Dev Kit will automatically choose the best available format for the end user’s browser.

thePlatform is constantly working to address the support of adaptive streaming technologies as they arise. We’ll keep you up-to-date as we roll them out.
To learn more, contact your Account Manager. For the latest on RMP 2.3.2, read the release notes. If you’re running your own instance of the RMP, download the new release from our Technical Resource Center.

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mpx Updates Simplify Workflow and Media Management

As mpx adoption continues, we are excited to announce a new suite of features in today’s mpx release.

Messaging Service

When we developed mpx Mobile, we did so with the understanding that online video is a 24-hour business. In that same line of thinking, we’re continuing to develop services that make it easier for our customers to manage their around-the-clock business. Our new messaging service does just that.

With the messaging service, account administrators can set up email notifications that are triggered when events occur within their account. Publish status changes, deleted media, media approvals, etc.—the messaging service insures that our customers can stay on top of what’s going on in their account 24/7.

Administrators can configure their notifications within mpx, through the following options:

• The type of event that triggers the notification
• The email template to use
• The list of recipients
• How often to send an email

The messaging service has a number of templates included, but also supports template creation for special use cases.

Publish Status

Our new Publish Status panel makes monitoring your publishing faster and easier, by displaying all of the relevant publish status information in a single panel on the media view pane. Confirm publish actions and troubleshoot errors right from the media view in mpx to save time in your workflow.

Feed Adapters

While thePlatform supports RSS feeds natively through the mpx console many times it is necessary to customize the MRSS output to meet the specific needs of content partners. Our Feed Adapters are designed to make this process customizable, allowing customers to meet the requirements of many outlets without having to create multiple feeds.

Feed Adapters rely on XSLT templates to parse the feed and reformat the results. These templates can be implemented directly by our customers within the mpx console, or we’re happy to assist with the process through an engagement with one of our Technical Account Managers. Check with your account manager to enable Feed Adapters in your account.

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Evaluating Web Service APIs: Criteria for flexible video management

When we started thePlatform, no one else was developing a set of video management APIs that anybody could use to build an online media business. Instead, they developed user interfaces on top of proprietary systems that could only expand when developers felt like adding features. If you wanted to do your own development on top of their systems, you were out of luck.

Since then we’ve had 10 years of continuous improvement and growth in our web service APIs. Other vendors started to add web services APIs over the same period and it’s now a standard part of evaluating a video management provider: “How good are the APIs, and can they grow with us?”

Our new white paper aims to help you out with this evaluation process, offering questions and answers that we hope will be useful in helping you figure out whether a vendor’s APIs are of a caliber that will meet your needs.

You can download the white paper from our web site Solutions page, but we’d like to cover some of the top criteria here to give you an idea of where to start.

Breadth

First, APIs should be available for as much of the video management system’s functionality as possible. You’re the best judge regarding what parts of the system you need to extend to support your business, so you’ll want all your development options open.

The easiest test of an API’s breadth is to go to a management console or user interface and try to figure out whether the vendor uses their own published API. If they’re not using it, not only is that a sign that they haven’t built their system for maximum adaptability, but they can’t rely on their own code to support their product.

Literally everything you can do with thePlatform’s systems—automating workflow, integrating with other technologies, adding, editing, and deleting metadata, etc.—is exposed through our APIs. It’s not possible for a feature to appear in the mpx without having a corresponding API, because we always start feature development with the API, and then build UI on top.

Clean Design

API endpoints should be well-focused on a single area of responsibility and use consistent operations and serialization methods for any object type. With one set of rules to interact with our services, you can better automate your workflow and everything you need to do to control your media.

Take a look at the provider’s API endpoint. If every call goes against an “api.provider.com” or “services.provider.com” endpoint, with some kind of “command” or “service” parameter as a switchboard, you know that they’ve implemented a single monolithic endpoint that contains all APIs.

This makes it very hard to do federated models in which some data is local to customers while other sets are in the cloud. For example, you might want to use the API cloud for almost all services, but keep end-user transaction data locally for retention purposes. With a single, monolithic API endpoint, you can’t do this.

It also puts a brake on feature development, which slows down as teams needed to coordinate feature work and deployments in a single code base.

Finally, there’s no single scalability strategy that works for all APIs: some APIs get magnitudes more traffic than others, and the mix of read vs. write traffic is different for different APIs, but a single switchboard API has to take a lowest-common-denominator approach.

If you’re rigorous about dividing services into areas of responsibility, you avoid these pitfalls. Several years ago, we split our APIs into separate, focused services in which each API has a single job to do. Therefore, other services aren’t affected if unexpected load hits one piece of the service, and we can scale each API as appropriate.

For example, if there are an abundance of feed requests, we can simply add another feeds server instead of spinning up another instance of the entire API stack.

Here are some examples of the APIs you’d use for different functions:

• For read/write calls on media, you work against http://mps.theplatform.com.
• If you only need to do reads against media, you work against http://read.mps.theplatform.com.
• For feed configuration, you go to http://feed.data.theplatform.com.
• For delivery restrictions, you go against http://delivery.data.theplatform.com.

If you’re interested in checking out the entire Index of Web Services, we list them in our in our Technical Resource Center.

Focus on Flexibility

You can get more in-depth information when you download the white paper, including evaluation criteria for secure API calls, proprietary serialization formats vs. web standards, and notifications support. We hope that when you finish reading it, you’ll have a useful tool for starting the conversation with your potential video management system provider. And, of course, that you’ll have an appreciation of how our data model can accommodate the needs of developers working in a wide variety of technologies, organizations, and content categories.

Download the white paper, and let us know if you have any questions, or want to get more information about how we’ve designed our services.

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mpx makes simple video editing even easier

Anyone who works directly with visual media knows that working in a larger view simplifies editing tasks. This has been true since film editors first started working with printed film stock, and is still true in digital media.
Video editors and producers have told us that making edits to video files in mpx would be a whole lot easier if they had more real estate to work in.

We heard the feedback, and made some changes: now you can get all of our in-system editing tools

• Approving and unapproving content
• Creating thumbnails
• Editing chapters

You can also clip an excerpt to create a new video, another new feature which we detail later in this post.

Bigger is better

What we did was to take our standard preview mode in the Media Details pane and add a button that brings you seamlessly into an expanded preview mode.

If you start to play a video in standard preview mode and switch to expanded mode, there’s no interruption in video playback: the video keeps playing and you can edit at will.

Create custom clips

Another requested feature is the ability to create a new media from an excerpt of an existing video. You can now do this in the expanded preview mode.

Click the Create Clip button, and in the expanded preview, set a start time and an end time either by using player controls or typing specific start and end times. When you save the clip, mpx generates a new video of the excerpt you specified.

More details on expanded preview mode and clipping an excerpt to create a new video are available in our Technical Resource Center.

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Five Benefits of Communities for Online Video

Written by: Luke Davies

In my previous post, The Power of Communities for Online Video, I talked about harnessing the collective wisdom of online communities. I’d like to get into more detail about the benefits of letting your viewers attach comments to a corresponding video frame or segment so that people can actually watch programs “together” at different times.

1. Interactive+interested=ad revenue. – People who are in a “lean forward” position and interacting with content are much more receptive to advertising. This interest level increases when the advertising is contextual and relevant to both the content and the emotions and feelings of the viewer.

2. Optimized for search engines. Viewers’ comments and interactions provide the metadata that search engines crave. Video has enormous amounts of very rich data, but it’s really tough to describe it all in the title of a video. However, if you can capture viewers’ interactions inside the player, your audience becomes your SEO strategy. Imagine describing something with a million words, all thought up by thousands of viewers vs. using three to five words thought up by one person; which description evokes an image that’s more vivid and understandable?

3. Increased distribution and discoverability. Humans are interesting creatures. Rarely do we have genuinely unique tastes or preferences (we’d have a lot more artists, if we did). More often we gravitate toward people we think are smart or cool (or both), and what we like is then highly influenced by their preferences. This is why communities are an important discoverability mechanism. If viewers could see what was interesting to the rest of the audience, it would help them decide what to watch.

4. Advanced Targeting. By analyzing viewers’ interactions, content owners can quickly see how their programming makes the audience feel and which parts of the content really interests them. Distributors can then use this viewer information to serve more relevant ads.

5. Extended life of your video assets. Currently, online videos behave like rapidly depreciating assets. Premium content will start out with a lot of streams, and fairly quickly and consistently the streams will fade to almost nothing, typically within about 90 days. Documents and images, however, seem to have the exact opposite behavior, becoming more popular over time as more people view them. The difference is that there are existing techniques for adding links and tags to images and documents. Thus they get picked up and moved up the rankings of search engines. By enabling viewers to add the same level of context and metadata to videos, it’s logical to assume that the videos could appreciate over time as well. This would significantly increase the total number of streams of distributors’ video assets.

LeanIn is the world’s first solution that enables viewers to interact inside a video player. Our overlay technology allows viewers to comment, bookmark, share, and search, and it all happens inside thePlatform video player. You can read more about LeanIn’s integration with thePlatform on the LeanIn partner page.

For more information on LeanIn, please visit www.leanin.com.

Luke Davies is the President of LeanIn, Inc.

Customer News - Blog"}

here! TV Launches Online Streaming Video Player

thePlatform is excited to announce our latest initiative with here! TV. Founded in 2002, here! airs on all major U.S. cable systems as a 24-hour subscription service. here! appears in 96 of the top 100 U.S. markets, including every top ten market. here! also was the first gay network originating in the U.S. to launch in Canada.

here! offers a wide variety of groundbreaking and acclaimed original movies and series plus the world’s largest collection of gay and lesbian films appealing to the broad-based, diverse LGBT audience.

here! TV has just launched the new here! Online Subscription Video Player, which streams through thePlatform. Visitors to here! TV’s dynamic website, found at www.heretv.com, gain instant access to the world’s largest LGBT film and television library for a low monthly fee. Watch here! series, films, and specials now at http://premium.heretv.com.

Read more in the here! TV press release.

Partner News - Blog"}

The Power of Communities for Online Video

Written By: Luke Davies, President, LeanIn

The intelligence of communities is pretty amazing. People are smart. A group of people is even smarter – much smarter about certain things than any computer or artificial intelligence.

Video content distributors that harness the “collective wisdom” of communities can see a number of benefits. But first, they need to understand what has driven these communities to develop.

Let’s go back and take a look at some of the first communities built around media: the social experiences created by television. Think back to that stereotypical 1950s family all gathered around the black and white television in the family living room. Then there are all of the discussions that happen at the office water cooler, where coworkers go over what happened on their favorite sitcoms or reality shows. Consider all of the relationships between people that are based on a common interest in a program or programs. People naturally want to share, talk about, and socialize around TV and video.

As more TV and video consumption happens online, it has become harder to share the simultaneous viewing experience with friends, peers, and community. The desire is still there, but the tools are missing.

Some people and communities have resorted to using Twitter as their medium for sharing TV and video preferences. If all the community members are viewing at the same time this can be an effective solution. The beauty of Twitter is that it’s great for capturing people’s thoughts as they happen. Thus, it works really well for live shows that are being viewed through traditional TV channels in real time.

However, people and communities time-shift and consume TV around their own schedules. Because Twitter is linear (unlike TV and other video content), it’s not always the best medium for interacting with others and sharing viewing experiences and preferences.
For example, if I’m viewing the Academy Awards live, there will be a flurry of tweets discussing all of the feelings and emotions of all of the other viewers and all the members of my online community. However, if I had to work late and watched a recorded version of the Oscars, I’d have no online community to share my experience with.

Communities need a solution that enables them to interact and share TV and video experiences, and to do it whenever they want.

Video content owners and distributors that bring these two mediums together will have a huge advantage. If content owners could bring these interactions inside the player, their audience could interact with their content right where they view it on-screen. Viewers and communities would no longer have to have multiple applications and screens open to effectively interact with their programming.

LeanIn is the world’s first solution that enables viewers to interact inside a video player. Our overlay technology allows viewers to comment, bookmark, share, and search. It all happens inside thePlatform video player. To see how it works, visit our LeanIn Partner page.

Luke Davies is the President of LeanIn, Inc.

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

508-compliance: A Player for Everyone

Section 508 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act requires that, along with other multimedia products, online video provide technologies and solutions to address the needs of those with disabilities. With our new 508-compliant video player, we’re delivering a player for everyone: individuals with blindness, poor vision, color blindness, deafness, and people who need keyboard controls. Using our Player Dev Kit framework, we’ve built specific functionality to meet federal requirements and give end users more player accessibility.

This player is a great solution for those who want to comply with Section 508, such as government or educational institutions, as well as any other organization that wants to increase access to their online video.

This new accommodating player includes the following features that meet the federal regulations:

• Simple player design for easy interaction
• Screen reader compatibility
• Keyboard controls
• Closed-captioning support

These features are included with our standard out-of-the-box 508-compliant player. If you would like to get started or want to learn more about the Player Dev Kit, please contact your Account Manager at thePlatform.

Partner News - Blog"}

Two Essentials for Delivering Video Content to Internet-Connected Devices

Written by: Brian Baker, CEO, Widevine

We are in the midst – or perhaps just the early stages – of a rapid proliferation of media-consuming devices and content distribution mechanisms beyond set-top boxes (STBs) and PCs. A new wave of Internet-connected retail electronics – from Blu-ray players, to televisions, to gaming platforms – means that there are more devices than ever before on which consumers can choose to view content.

However, there are a couple of key requirements that need to be in place before content can be delivered to multiple devices.

The first is content security. Studios and broadcasters won’t license their content to be delivered to just any device; it must be proven that the content can be kept secure, regardless of the device to which it is being delivered. This can be done with digital rights management (DRM), but because each device is different, it’s too complicated and cumbersome to create a unique DRM system to support each type.
In addition, a DRM system must be able to secure content no matter how it is delivered or consumed. It must accommodate various delivery methods, such as streaming, progressive download, and straight download, and usage models, such as electronic sell-through, rental, subscription, online, and offline playback. A DRM system must be capable of handling multiple devices, delivery methods, and usage models.

The other key component for successfully delivering content over the Internet to any device is ensuring a high quality of experience (QoE) for the end user. A consumer’s available bandwidth is never consistent, and the fluctuations in bandwidth can cause video playback to pause and buffer each time the bandwidth falls below the optimal level required for smooth playback.

Adaptive bit rate streaming technology, or simply adaptive streaming, can mitigate this problem by adjusting the video quality to keep in step with the consumer’s available bandwidth, ensuring as consistent and smooth an experience as network conditions allow.

When considering adaptive streaming solutions, service providers and content producers should focus their search on that that:

• Run on standard, low-cost HTTP servers rather than costly, proprietary alternatives.
• Support MPEG2TS encoding rather than custom encoding, to also help reduce overall cost.
• Support both Video on Demand (VOD) and live or linear streams, to keep additional options open.

With DRM and adaptive streaming in place, service providers can give subscribers a seamless, high-quality experience on the device of their choice, at the most convenient time for them. It’s the combination of security and consistent playback that will have your viewers coming back for more.

Widevine provides adaptive streaming, virtual DVD-like trick play, and DRM solutions for Internet content providers and cable, satellite, and telecommunication companies to provide a TV Everywhere or over-the-top environment for the ultimate customer experience on a range of consumer electronics, including Internet enabled Blu-ray players, TVs, gaming, and mobile platforms.

For more information on Widevine, please visit www.widevine.com.

Brian Baker is the Chief Executive Officer of Widevine Technologies, Inc.

Corporate Updates - Blog"}

Our TV Everywhere Solution at Work

Over the past year, thePlatform has worked directly with many multi-video programming distributors, or MVPDs, to develop a simple and clear TV Everywhere solution. Various methodologies have popped up throughout the industry, but we’ve focused on building and refining a solution that actually works. The outcome is a set of adapters that enable programmer sites to authenticate subscribing customers of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and Bright House Networks, and give those customers online access to the content to which they’re entitled.

What’s different about our particular approach to TV Everywhere? After all, TV Everywhere should be fairly straightforward: let cable subscribers access the content they’re entitled to from any location on any device. Pretty simple, right? Think again.

There are two key challenges that quickly make the process complex:

• First there’s user authentication, which often requires data from disparate back-end billing systems to validate the subscriber. These systems are typically not easy to access or integrate with.
• And then there’s playback authorization, which is complicated by inconsistent channel IDs, local token authentication, and the necessity of processing authorization calls quickly for a seamless user experience.

So how have we simplified this complex problem?

We’ve done the heavy lifting required for system integration with a single Authentication Adapter service that manages the entire complex cross-referencing among the various companies and systems involved. The adapter translates the user credentials into the format required by each system.

And what about authorization?

Once a consumer is authenticated as a subscriber, programmers might need to control content playback based on the consumer’s subscription package. thePlatform uses a secure token and its associated channel IDs to tailor the browsing experience and identify the content a user has access to.

It’s important that these processes happen fast—consumers want to start watching their videos instantly, and don’t want to wait. So within milliseconds, thePlatform’s service speeds through all of the tasks necessary to maintain the business policies and financial obligations between programmers and service providers:

• Verifying alignment between the video, the TV service provider’s channel lineup, and the consumer’s subscription package
• Ensuring that media rights associated with individual shows—such as airdates, geographic restrictions, and other business polices–are enforced
• Re-verifying that the consumer is still an active customer of the TV service provider

Ready to get started? If you want to extend subscription packages for premium content, read our TV Everywhere Solution Guide. And if you’re a programmer who wants to provide TV Everywhere capabilities on your web site, read our TV Everywhere Certification Guide.

We have helped launch successful TV Everywhere initiatives with these adapters, and are continuing to onboard more. To learn more about our TV Everywhere solution, contact your Account Manager.

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Eventful Week in the Online Video World

This has been an eventful week in the world of online video – both for the industry and our customers.

On the industry side, an international coalition of companies announced the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR) – an initiative that will provide a uniform approach to cataloging movies, television shows, and other commercial audio/video assets with unique identifiers (IDs). The idea is similar in concept to the way UPC codes identify physical packaged goods or ISBN codes identify books. With the growing libraries of premium online video, the EIDR is a timely and welcomed initiative for all of us involved in the online video ecosystem. A key part of our role at thePlatform is to help manage the complexity of multiplatform video publishing on behalf of our clients. We applaud efforts like the EIDR and look forward to working with the consortium to enable a more seamless experience for both our customers and consumers.

In addition, this week we saw the expanded online launch of Xfinity TV, and we’re proud to continue providing the back-end support for this expansive undertaking. We have learned tremendously from this “TV Everywhere“ initiative, and those lessons help us support all of our customers with robust, scalable, and flexible solutions for publishing and monetizing content on PCs, mobile devices, TVs and over-the-top platforms.

And finally, we would like to once again extend our congratulations to our customer PBS on the outstanding revamp of their website, and the additional iPad and iPhone apps. We’ve always been impressed with the innovative approach PBS takes with our system for publishing and aggregating the content from its hundreds of member stations. PBS remains at the cutting edge of multiplatform video, and we’re thrilled to play a small part behind the scenes.

If you have any questions about how any of these initiatives could impact your business, please call or email your account manager

Corporate Updates - Blog"}

mpx – Successfully Changing the Engines on a Flying Plane

Announcing the Gold Release of mpx

Today, we are pleased to announce the gold release of mpx.

This project actually started three years ago. We were on pace to manage one billion video views that year and our original system, mps, was starting to show its age. The technology and development methodology we started with in 2000 had served us well over the years but we realized that we had to make changes if we wanted to maintain velocity in a rapidly evolving market.

Our customers’ businesses were maturing rapidly and their needs required a faster pace of innovation from us. And the projects we saw on the horizon would require enterprise-class reliability to handle billions of video views every month, which is something you need to design for from day one.

Recasting video management

So we made a decision to start over, not from scratch, but with a playbook based on years of experience with demanding customers who constantly pushed the envelope. Our vision was of a brand new video management system built on a true service-oriented architecture. We named it mpx.

Each mpx service plays a distinct role, such as ingest, sharing, publishing, feeds, entitlements, or players. They can be scaled horizontally: when a customer recently added 5 million new titles to the system, we added ingest capacity to meet the task. The mpx services can also be federated, allowing for some to be hosted in the cloud, and others to be deployed in our customers’ facilities to provide an optimal user experience.

mpx meets the reliability requirement. With a federated deployment, customers get geographic redundancy and integrated caching so the audience can keep watching video, even if the backbone goes down.

A new face

On top of the mpx services, we’ve built a brand new video management console. A main design goal was easy management of large content libraries, because it’s common for our customers to manage tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands—of videos in our system. They needed simple features like faceted search, personal shortcuts, and blade navigation to make working with video libraries easy.

One management feature that will make a big difference for our customers is the Publish Profile. Creating the many video formats and thumbnails that differ for every web site, mobile device, and TV can be complicated. Once a Publish Profile is set up, video producers can simply click publish without any knowledge of the complexity behind the scenes. And mpx is the only system that enables editors to combine a static playlist with a dynamically updating feed.

The business model support you need

We’ve found that customers have a need for a growing variety of business models. So we built content restrictions with geo-fencing, availability windows, and integrations with several DRM systems. You can set advertising policies that define when to display an ad, and which ad server to use as a primary and which as failover to ensure you maximize your fill rate.

If you need a digital store, our Consulting Services team is here to help you out. The mpx syndication tools help your content reach web sites such as YouTube and MSN, mobile phones on AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, and over-the-top services like Boxee, Roku, and GoogleTV. If you’re considering a TV Everywhere model, we can now authenticate customers of Bright House, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable, and more adapters for other MVPDs are on the way.

A new engine

Some have described a re-architecture as changing the engines on a flying plane: it’s difficult to build something new while maintaining and improving the old. We’re very proud of thePlatform team and everything they have accomplished. We believe our easy video management, support for more business models, and enterprise-class reliability are simply better than everything else in the market. We got there by sticking to our roots, which are solidly planted in great software development, but also by realizing that we had to try new things. mpx represents our best work yet.

If you’d like to learn more about mpx and how it can help your video business, please contact us today.

Ian Blaine
CEO of thePlatform

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

mpx Goes Gold

Today, thePlatform released the gold version of mpx, a true enterprise-class video management system.

We’ve been steadily improving mpx Beta since it launched early this year, and the new features accompanying today’s mpx release reflect a decade of experience and input from our customers.
Since 2000, we’ve focused on making video management easier, powering more monetization models, and delivering enterprise-class performance to our customers and superior video experiences to their audiences.

This decade of experience has resulted into today’s mpx, the next evolution of broadband video management. Because we “get” the work of content producers and editors, we developed mpx to be the convergence of an efficient user interface model with the most mature, flexible online video management technologies.

You can get the run-down on today’s launch in the mpx Release Notes. But here’s a look at some of the features you’ll see when you log in.
Not using mpx yet? Call or email your Account Manager to get your team started!

Thumbnail capture. To capture a thumbnail from a video, you can drag the scrubber and the image will update to that position. For precise frame-by-frame control, you can use the left and right arrows on your keyboard.
If you find that the preview player isn’t giving you the detail you need for precise capture, all of this can be done in a full-screen view as well.

Chapter creation. Add a Chapter field to your media panel so that editors and producers can add chapter start and end times, titles, and thumbnail URLs.

User-friendly reports. Usage reports now give you both graphic and table views for your data. You can use one or two pivot points based on values such as date, media metadata, file metadata values, and context.

To narrow down your report, you can search by title, asset type, ad policy, or other field ID. For example, this graph shows Date and Title data, and is narrowed down to two media.

With all of the combined pivoting and search options, there are over 130,000 possible charts. We think that’s pretty cool. Once you’ve got a report, you can copy the table to the clipboard, or export the data as CSV.

With the Ingest Service now integrated into mpx, adding ingest adapters and using Watch Folders and Feed Readers has never been easier.

Corporate Updates - Blog"}

thePlatform at Streaming Media Europe

Here at thePlatform, we’re broadening our operations in Europe in order to meet the growing demands from customers—and potential customers—to help support their next-generation video publishing efforts. As such, we look forward to our appearances and sponsorship at the upcoming Streaming Media Europe event in London the second week of October.

Our Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Marty Roberts, will be involved with two panels at next week’s show.

Wed., Oct. 13, 4:15 p.m.

The State of the Online Video Stack

Marty participates in this panel to discuss how, as ISPs, telcos, CDNs and online video platforms are moving up and down the online video stack, the lines are blurring between them, making it difficult to determine how the pieces all fit together. However, in order to successfully vertically or horizontally integrate within an online video initiative a nuanced understanding of all the suppliers is crucial. This lively panel discussion features representatives from each level of the online video stack and you’ll emerge with a clearer picture of what it is and how it’s changing.

Fri., Oct. 15, 11:45 a.m.

How Streaming Video is Changing the Television Landscape

Marty will moderate this panel on Friday morning. Catch-up services like the BBC iPlayer and 4oD—as well as initiatives in Spain, France and Germany—are showing that savvy audiences are turning to their computers for entertainment, and in a way that can be profitable. How are traditional and cutting-edge companies capitalizing on this trend? In addition to providing the content, how are they taking advantage of this “connected” platform as they deliver content?

Among many other things during the past year, thePlatform has supported the industry’s largest TV Everywhere initiatives in North America, and Marty will share some of our unique perspectives at this show. Leveraging our decade of experience in online video, we look forward to serving an expanded group of content providers and IPTV/Pay-TV providers in Europe. Our system provides a unified approach to managing video for multi-platform publishing and combines the lessons of web, mobile, and over-the-top distribution with the robustness of a carrier-grade solution.

So, if you’re in London and attending Streaming Media Europe, between Oct. 13 and Oct. 15, we encourage you to attend one or both of our panels.

thePlatform in the press - Blog"}

thePlatform is a finalist in Light Reading’s Leading Lights Awards

thePlatform is excited to announce that we have been named as a finalist in the “Best New Service or Application (Cable)” category of Light Reading’s Leading Lights awards!

The “Best New Service or Application (Cable)” award is given to “the company that has deployed a potentially market-leading, revenue-generating service or application that enhances the use of next-generation communications technology in the cable network.”

Winners will be announced at an Awards Dinner at Hudson Terrace in New York City on Nov. 2, following the first day of Ethernet Expo Americas 2010.

Read more about the Leading Lights awards at LightReading.com. (Registration required.)

Tech Tips - Blog"}

Are You Ready to Support Closed Captioning?

Closed-captions are an important element for members of your online video audience who are hearing impaired. So it’s important that content providers review the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009, which is working its way through the legislative process right now. The act, which amends the Communications Act of 1934, requires that some video content providers offer the capability to display closed captions and make encoded video description and emergency information audible.

More benefits from transcript data

Besides complying with the pending law (if and when it becomes law) and providing a great experience to your hearing-impaired audience members, enabling closed captioning can also serve the following purposes:

• The transcript can be used for narration for visually-impaired individuals.
• With the right player-side technology, the time-coded aspect of the video transcript enables your audience to find and go directly to specific scenes or moments in the video.
• There is greater opportunity to increase your video’s global reach with translated caption content.
• The transcript can be indexed by search engines for greater discoverability.
• It helps non-native speakers and other learners (such as children) with word identification, enriching their experience with your video.
• It gives audiences a way to experience and understand your video content if they can’t listen to audio during their viewing session for any other reason.

How does it work?

Closed captioning, which relies on temporal metadata (associated with a specific timeframe), isn’t very complicated when you have the right systems in place. To provide captions as an option with your videos, you need three things:

1. A complete transcript of each video, converted into a time-coded text file (either SAMI or DFXP):

• Distribution format exchange profile (DFXP) is an XML-based language for marking timed-based text, such as closed captions and subtitles.
• SAMI (Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange) is a markup language for simplifying caption creation for media playback on a PC.

2. A player that supports captions, like thePlatform’s Player Dev Kit
3. A video management system that can deliver the requisite SAMI/DFXP file, like thePlatform’s mpx Beta.

You can incorporate SAMI-format caption files into your media objects, and your users can choose to view captions when they play Flash video.

Players built with the Player Dev Kit support closed captioning in two different ways:

• Using separate caption files that conform to either the SAMI 1.0 or DFXP 1.0 specifications
• Reading data embedded into an MPEG4 media stream

SAMI and DFXP files

thePlatform’s mpx Beta video management system relies on a custom field named “Subtitles” when constructing release metafiles that reference separate caption files. You create this custom field before assigning any caption media files to your media.

When a Player Dev Kit player sees a SAMI or DFXP file reference included in the metafile for a clip, it enables closed captioning for the user by displaying a closed-caption button. The user can click it to display captions, and they then get a menu of the available caption languages, based on choices that you provide. When they click the language that they want to view, the player begins displaying captions.

Until they make another choice, the player remembers their language preference and displays captions whenever that language is available. This makes the user experience much better for your closed-captioning users who make repeated visits to your site.

MPEG-4 files.

You don’t need to set up a “Subtitles” field if your MPEG-4 files contain transcript data. The Player Dev Kit automatically processes caption data that is embedded within the MPEG4 stream, and the language for the captions is added to the closed caption button in the player.

thePlatform has integrated partners like PLYmedia and RAMP that can help you prepare and render your captions in a Player Dev Kit player. Contact your Account Manager to learn more.

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More Control for Your Video Business

mpx Beta launches tools to help control your online video business

Today’s growing video companies have changing needs. This week we launched a number of new features for mpx Beta to help better control that growth. They include new tools for creating and managing feeds, better support for applying ad policies, and more capabilities for configuring restrictions. These features add to the already rich feature set of mpx Beta.

Increase video views with more options for managing feeds

Creating a new feed in mpx Beta is simple. Just go to the feeds section and add a new feed. From there, you can configure any number of parameters including the content categories, the format (RSS, JSON, Atom), whether content needs to be approved or not, the feed cache lifetime, the sorting keys, and more. You can also specify the fields that will appear in the feed content including namespaces, media fields, file fields, category fields, and more. Lastly, you can apply ad policies and restrictions to the feed.

Once you have a feed created, it’s time to add content to it. You can add content to a feed from the media view or from the feed view. You can set the lineup automatically by creating a dynamic feed based off of categories, tags, workflow labels or a custom field. You can also curate the content of a lineup and specify what shows up first, second, third, and so on. We provide a feed preview window where you can drag and drop content into the order you prefer. Lastly, you can even set up a mixed lineup, where the first set of videos are curated, and the rest are dynamically generated based on your predefined parameters.

Monetize more of your content with full support for ad policies

mpx Beta supports the creation and use of multiple ad polices. An ad policy is a set of rules, settings, and connections to ad sources that ensure your video content is monetized properly. You can integrate the ad sources from any of our advertising partners.

Creating an ad policy allows you to integrate a primary and secondary (failover) ad provider. You can create and define ad wrappers and you can specific settings for bumpers, pre-rolls, mid-rolls, and post-rolls. You set the number of ads to show for each, the frequency of showing, and whether the user can skip them or not. Lastly, you can set up a default policy for all of your content or apply an ad policy on a specific release or to content in a particular feed.

Manage your content relationships with extensive support for restrictions

As a media company, you understand the requirements for when and where you can show online video, and when and where you can’t. Helping our customers respect content relationships is a critical part of mpx.

There are many kinds of restrictions that need to be enabled in today’s online video world. They include geo-restrictions on country, region, metro code, city, area code, and postal code. While some geo-restrictions may be inclusive, others may be exclusive and require blackout areas for specific audiences. mpx supports all of these scenarios and more. With mpx you can restrict content by referring domain, expiration, date, IP Address, and even specified keys. You can set a default restriction for all your content or apply restrictions to content in feeds and/or to individual URLs.

Other great features for managing all aspects of your video business in mpx Beta

In addition to the new features for feeds, ad policies, and restrictions, mpx Beta also includes new features that make it easier to manage content across different deployment scenarios.

• For those who have a multilingual effort, we now have bidirectional language support in our console.
• In addition, we’ve added more features to mpx Beta to streamline your administration including the capabilities to create asset types, add servers, and customize file-level management of Public URLs (Releases) so you can create and manage your files’ URLs in the media object view.

Introducing the Whitepaper: Securing the Broadband Video Delivery Chain

Overall, with this latest release of mpx Beta we’ve added some extensive features for empowering different business models. In support of that effort, we’ve developed a brand new whitepaper dedicated to how we secure your business’s content. The new security whitepaper covers the entire online video content security landscape for our customers. In the process, we offer best practices of mpx for your consideration in this whitepaper for when you are evaluating any video management system.

Download the whitepaper here. Or contact thePlatform today for more information on great features of mpx and how you can put it to use in your organization.

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

Clipping and Sharing with PDK 4.2.3

With the release of our PDK 4.2 social media player earlier this year, we gave your audience a way to select and share clips from your video. The latest version of the PDK 4.2.3 improves on the clipping feature by making the shared excerpt appear as a full clip.

Clipping puts users in control in the sharing process. It allows them to curate shared content for the intended audience, making that content more likely to be viewed. In the process, you retain business control as your advertising and content policies continue to move with the curated clip as if it were any other clip from your library.

This is how it works:

1. The viewer plays the video, and then clicks the Share button.

2. They then see a scrubber bar on which they select start and end points for their clip.

3. After they share the clip to a site, the clip recipients see only the portion of the video shared, with new start and end points applied.

The 4.2.3 player gives the recipient more context: the control rack shows them exactly how long the shared video clip is. This is a change from how we originally designed the clipping feature. Previously, recipients saw a scrubber bar that showed the entire timeframe of the video beyond the shared clip. Timeframe context gives recipients more reason for watching your video (“It’s just a short clip; I’ve got time to watch that!”).

In order to encourage further sharing, we’ve also made it easy to keep the level of personalization high: the recipient can either re-share that clip, or create a completely new one from any portion of that clip.

Find out what else is new in PDK 4.2.3 and download the latest version in the Technical Resource Center.

Tech Tips - Blog"}

Blog: More Social Media Sharing Options in the PDK

With the growth of Facebook, Twitter, and other online social networking platforms, the opportunities to syndicate content and virally grow an audience are tremendous. Our customers appreciate that we offer a mix of solutions in this arena.

The latest version of the PDK (PDK 4.2.3) lets you add a single sharing button right onto your control rack so that viewers can share video directly from the video screen.

What else can you do from our social media player? Check out these features:

• Offer your audience more social media sites for sharing, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo! Buzz, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, VodPod, Reddit, and Windows Live.
• For a more personalized sharing experience, let viewers clip a video and send to a friend. The shared video will start automatically at the point the sender specifies.
• Enable Twitter hash tags to automatically send a tag along with your shared video, which helps you track and manage your Twitter sharing traffic.

Download the latest version of the PDK in the Technical Resource Center, or contact your Account Manager today to learn more.

Customer News - Blog"}

Colorful Customizations: PBS KIDS GO!  Player

If it’s been awhile since you checked out a completely custom player, you should visit the PBS KIDS GO! site. Using our Player Development Kit (PDK) 4.2.1, PBS KIDS GO! has added new features to keep their young audience engaged:

• A custom animation of a spinning cube tells the viewers that the next video is loading:
  
• A pop-out slider bar provides a easy volume control:
  

• Closed captions are on a custom overlay that provides contrast between background and text:
  

• Viewers can tag favorites and see a video’s tally:
  

PBS KIDS GO! keeps impressing us with their PDK customizations. Visit the site to see their creative designs and great content, and give us a call if you’d like information on creating a custom player with thePlatform’s PDK.

Tech Tips - Blog"}

Create and Customize PDK End Cards

End cards, which are customizable forms that appear over a player, give you ways to close out a playlist while also inviting customers to view more videos. The latest Player Development Kit (PDK 4.2.3) includes an end card for related videos.

To add an end card, install PDK 4.2.3 and ensure the relatedItemsUrl is defined. By default, the endCard parameter is set to tpMenuCard, but you can customize it to show any end card you create. If the parameter is not present, then the player will not display any end cards.

Of course, as with almost every other element of the PDK, you can customize your end card however you want including customization of colors, text, links, messages of the page and related items list.

For more information on end cards and how they work, see the topic Modifying the Default Forms in the Technical Resource Center.

See end cards in action in the player below. Just watch the video playlist all the way to the end.

Partner News - Blog"}

Building the Next-Generation TV Guide

Written by: Yosi Glick, Jinni Co-Founder and President

Nowadays television viewers have more content options than ever before: hundreds of linear channels, thousands of VOD titles, and even more content on the DVR. This new era in entertainment calls for a new type of TV guide, one that helps viewers easily find what they want.

In developing a guide with greater usability, you need to consider five core principles.

The User Is at the Center

Current guides are content-centric. Long, static, and unsuited to discovery in a rich content environment, they force the user to stick to known shows or channel-zap at random. Guides are also provider-centric: displaying providers’ icons (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) in the main menu puts the user’s preferences (i.e. which movie or show to watch) second.

The next generation of guides will be user-centric. The starting point will be the individual. What are you in the mood to watch? What types of movies and shows do you usually like? What did you watch recently that you enjoyed? Discovery tools will filter the universe of content based on the user’s moods and tastes.

This approach also encourages the user to look beyond the familiar hits and new releases to find what fits his or her preferences in rich content libraries, and to take full advantage of robust multi-channel programming.

The Discovery Process Is Holistic

“Channel zapping” – simply browsing what’s on TV now – is no longer a viable way to decide what to watch. To bring users from a one-size-fits-all consumption model to an experience that fits his or her viewing context and desired effort level, a discovery service should offer a versatile set of easy-to-use tools. For example, a “browse-by-mood” approach might suit a user in an active mindset who is inclined to provide more input to the system in order to refine the recommendations, whereas personalized recommendations fit a user in a passive mindset, and group recommendations (based on analyzing the tastes of several registered users) suit users interested in social viewing.

The Catalog Is Meant for Discovery

An intuitive discovery process starts with a catalog that reflects the way users think about content. Genres (comedy, action, etc.) were originally designed for back-office cataloging. By contrast, indexing content by storyline, mood, style, etc. – the language people use to talk about what they watch – can support genuinely intuitive discovery experiences.

A deeper understanding of people is also crucial for personalized discovery. Collaborative filtering, which uses statistical correlations between users and content items – the familiar “people who liked X also like Y” – cannot easily analyze the “whole picture” of a specific user’s tastes. New approaches aim to understand and model each user’s unique, multifaceted tastes. As part of a highly personalized experience, such models can also be used to describe and compare users’ tastes e.g. “You both especially like clever and touching stories about buddies and falling in love.”

The User Interface Is Only as Good as the Underlying Data

The user interface is key to a positive entertainment selection and viewing experience. Most entertainment interfaces look remarkably similar because they’re designed around the “same old” data: keywords such as titles and people, and genres. Data reflecting intuitive categories (moods, storylines) can naturally support innovative, intuitive interfaces.

The Viewing Experience Is Multiplatform

Users watch content on a range of platforms, from PCs and TVs to mobile devices and game consoles. A next-generation guide should work with as many platforms as possible and facilitate viewing wherever the user chooses.

Read more about how you can take advantage of Jinni’s discovery-and-recommendation engine for premium video content with their plug-in to thePlatform’s Player Development Kit (PDK).

Yosi Glick is the Co-Founder and President of Jinni.

Customer News - Blog"}

New Customers in Canada: Canwest and CBC Case Studies

This past year we welcomed new Canadian customers Canwest and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and this week we’re publishing case studies that outline our solutions for their broadband video initiatives.
We think you’ll be particularly interested in these case studies if you’re seeking creative ideas for using our Player Development Kit (PDK), or are looking for flexibility in your content ingest options.

• Canwest, Canada’s largest media company, needed a scalable online video solution for a network of television stations and newspaper assets, including 18 specialty channels and GlobalTV, their largest broadcasting property.
• CBC/Radio-Canada, the only multilingual Canadian broadcaster delivering a comprehensive range of radio, television, Internet, and satellite-based services, needed an on-demand video and audio portal for broadcast TV, film clips, and webisodes from numerous Canadian and global content producers.

With the addition of Canwest and CBC, thePlatform supports online video publishing services for some of the largest media companies in Canada. We’re helping Rogers with their Rogers On Demand Online TV Everywhere initiative, and supporting Corus Entertainment’s entertainment portals, including Treehouse TV, YTV.com, and W Network.

If you’re in Banff next week at the nextMEDIA conference(link to conference website), come see our VP of Sales and Marketing, Marty Roberts, in the panel Working with Ad Networks: Monetizing Content. During this panel, Marty and others will discuss the ad network landscape and how to select the best mix of technology, advertisers, tools, and resources.

Check out the case studies, and give us a call if you have any questions about how thePlatform can you help you out with your own broadband video projects.

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

RMP Supports Windows Server 2008

thePlatform’s Remote Media Processor (RMP 2.2.3) now supports Microsoft Windows Server 2008®, which means you can take advantage of the latest Windows Server features including more hardware scaling features, improved power consumption capabilities, and better management tools. In addition, RMP now supports Windows 7®, giving you more options than ever in your deployments.

While thePlatform runs its video management system as an application service provider (ASP), we serve clients with a variety of requirements. RMP is ideal for customers who want to run video publishing operations in a hybrid environment, mixing locally housed services with online hosted services to maximize efficiency and maintain flexibility.

RMP helps ensure that your entire workflow is faster even when the largest and/or highest bitrate mezzanine files need to be processed, encoded, and moved to the right locations. With RMP, you can manage local delivery and storage servers, online hosted services, and third-party hosted delivery and storage servers all from one console.

Specifically, RMP is ideal when:

• You have very large media files to be transcoded, encrypted, or otherwise processed, and you want to do some of that work locally.
• You want make your workflow smarter and minimize the bandwidth used when moving files over the Internet for common workflow tasks.
• Your content or services are behind corporate firewalls and you need a local server that can act as a proxy with the outside world to deliver your media files.
• You want to increase security by processing your high-quality media files on servers controlled by your organization before they travel across the Internet.

Review the RMP release notes to see the latest features of RMP 2.2.3, or contact us today to find out how RMP and the rest of thePlatform’s products and services can help you optimize your operations and grow your business.

Corporate Updates - Blog"}

thePlatform is Excited to Welcome New CFO/COO, Jamie Miller

Today we’re happy to introduce Jamie Miller as our new Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer. We’re actually welcoming him back—he joined us for several years after we merged with Rocketvox, where he was a Co-Founder, board member, COO, and CFO.

Jamie has 16 years of experience financing, building, managing, and successfully exiting technology companies, and has managed nine private and public market M&A transactions on behalf of four companies. Jamie is a passionate manager who has made a career of building and leading highly effective organizations. Most recently, Jamie served as President at Zango, eventually becoming its general manager after it was acquired by blinkx in April of 2009.

He’ll be overseeing our Accounting, Human Resources, and Legal departments, and lead our growing Professional Services organization. Jamie has an extensive background in professional services consulting, having served as COO/CFO and EVP Business Development at ePartners, Microsoft’s largest business applications consultancy in the United States, with nearly 400 employees.

We’re also pleased to announce that Marty Roberts, VP of Marketing since 2007, is now VP, Sales and Marketing. Taking on Sales, Marty builds on his successes in repositioning the company and products, increasing brand awareness, building a partner ecosystem, and driving product strategy.

Congratulations Marty, and welcome, Jamie!

- Blog"}

Your Shortcut to HTML5 Video Support

Written By: Alan Ramaley, CTO, thePlatform

We've been geeking out over the iPads lying around our office, watching videos on sites that we've helped customers build. Being a white label system, we let our customers speak for themselves, but if you've watched a video on an iPad you've probably hit our systems. It's clear that the tablet form factor is perfect for online video, and whether it's an iPad, Android device, tablet PC, or whatever else gets leaked to Gizmodo next, we think that's where a lot of consumption is going to happen.


Check out a demo of our HTML5 Player.

So, based on the work we've been doing, we’d thought we'd write up some notes on how we've traditionally approached these kind of multi-format, multi-environment players, and show how we carry this tradition forward in HTML5. People following the format debates—Flash over RTMP, MPEG-4 over HTTP, On2 VP8, Ogg, the various fragment-based formats like Apple live streaming, Silverlight Smooth Streaming, Akamai HD, Adobe’s Project Zeri, etc.— can find themselves struggling to make the right choice, and we’d like to help them avoid the mistakes we’ve seen in other HTML5 video frameworks.

Our new white paper, Building Real-World Video Sites in HTML5, is for readers familiar with player technologies in particular, and web development in general. But it also has value for non-technical audiences, as it points out the issues that any real HTML5 player framework has to solve. By the end of the whitepaper, you should have a very clear view of thePlatform's HTML5 support, and it should also be clear that it's the most complete, thought-through offering out there.

Check out our embeddable HTML5 player below:

When you’re ready, you can start building HTML5 players using the latest version of our Player Development Kit. Our partners are quickly updating their controls to support HTML5 video, and you can start using these JavaScript libraries today:

To support ad insertion into PDK-based HTML5 video players, LiveRail has a JSON endpoint for their ad delivery system and a set of JavaScript functions that handle ad display, behavior, and tracking.

VodPod has developed a single embed code for both Flash- and HTML5-compliant video.

“Working with thePlatform’s new HTML5 PDK was a great experience – the framework is extremely robust and enables a full advertising experience almost parallel to Flash. As partners, we were able to easily integrate our HTML5 plug-in to give our customers a cross-platform, cross-device advertising experience. This is very exciting for us, and I believe for the industry as a whole. This type of easy integration is exactly what the advertising space needs to propel cross-platform delivery forward.” -- Andrei Dunca, CTO LiveRail

Partners Auditude and FreeWheel are also working on their own PDK integrations for HTML5 video.

If you’re not yet using the PDK, contact your Account Manager at thePlatform to get set up. Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

mpx Beta adds Custom Commands and External File Links

As we continue to receive great feedback on mpx Beta, we’re following up with more features and functionality. Today’s update to mpx Beta adds custom commands and support for external file links to the console to help you further customize your video management workflow.

Custom Commands

Custom commands are key tools for helping you integrate mpx Beta with any number of other web service consoles, including those for reporting systems, CDNs, social sites, or any third-party service provider. Use custom commands to create your own console “mashup” that fits your needs: insert links to third-party documents, call another publishing service, or even string together any number of API calls to automate steps in the workflow.

You can also:

• Bring in reports from other systems.
• Trigger synchronizations from or to other content management systems.
• Render custom views that only show information relevant to a particular workflow.
• Trigger external encoding services.
• Preview something in a staging player.

As long as the service you want to integrate is available on the web, all you have to do is enter the URL in the custom command panel.

Your mpx Beta console then displays a button that will call that URL and either bring up the appropriate location or act on whatever object is selected.

External File Links

With external file links you can use files without having to upload them. File locations are stored independent from the actual files.

You can use External File Links to:

• Model live encoders and live streams in your workflows.
• Model files being managed by a partner.
• Reduce storage and bandwidth costs by fetching things only when you need them.
• Migrate from another system without having to move all your existing files.

Using external file links is easy. Every file already has a URL location modeled in the system. You can edit this link as needed, and the system automatically detects whether or not the new file is streaming, is a video or thumbnail, or contains particular security credentials that need to be stored separately.

Additionally, you can also set up a failover URL for a backup file location. If you want to control which resources to use for tasks such as encoding or delivery, you can add tags that limit access to that file from particular zones.

Together, custom commands and external file links provide valuable workflow customization features that enable and expand the kind of flexibility and adaptability that you have come to expect from thePlatform.
To learn more about mpx Beta, check out our mpx Beta page or contact sales@theplatform.com.

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

An Update on Our Ingest Service

Introduced last year, thePlatform’s Ingest Service has proven to be one of our most popular workflow services. More than 30% of our customers are using it, and we’re adding more every day. In the first three months of 2010, the service has managed over 8 million pieces of content. And it‘s fast and efficient. On high-traffic days, the service has managed over 16K pieces of content per hour.

Flexible from the start

Like everything at thePlatform, we built the Ingest Service for flexibility. It offers a variety of ways to upload and manage content in our system whether you are ingesting content from one location or many, from inside or outside a corporate network. It doesn’t matter whether your system is independent or working together with other video management solutions, the Ingest Service adapts to existing workflows and network environments in a way that keeps your media content flowing.

Adapters for any need

With Ingest Adapters, the service can ingest content and its associated metadata in just about any format. Our most popular adapter is the MRSS adapter, but we can also create powerful custom Groovy script adapters for whatever metadata format you use. Groovy Script adapters have been deployed to work with Excel and XML-based metadata content. With our adapters you can keep your existing workflow and get your content into our system with no reformatting of metadata required.

Watch Folders

Watch Folders are FTP folders into which you can place media content with its associated metadata. You can add, update, or delete content from the system by just dropping changes into the folder. Watch Folders are especially useful if you have distributed offices or if your editors or partners directly submit content to your site. In addition, Watch Folders are also popular when working in secure environments, as they support SFTP.

The Feed Reader

The Feed Reader can connect to any media feed and pull in the content along with its associated metadata. It is especially useful for customers that are working with multiple video content or digital asset management systems. If your organization has divisions that need to share, distribute, or migrate content quickly and efficiently to other divisions, the Feed Reader is a quick and easy way to get the job done.

Overall, the Ingest Service is a resounding success for our customers. If you are new to thePlatform and want to see how this service (along with our other valuable services) can help your business adapt to an ever-changing video management environment, contact sales@theplatform.com today.

If you are a customer of thePlatform and haven’t checked out the Ingest Service, we recommend contacting your Account Manager today to find out what it can do for you.

Partner News - Blog"}

Supporting advanced transcoding requirements

Written By: Kirk Marple

Customer transcoding requirements are growing beyond file‐to‐file transcoding as capabilities previously only seen in non-linear editing systems become possible at transcode time. For example, it’s now possible to apply media transformation templates to incoming content to render a finished, composited, mixed output file without taking up a video editing station’s valuable time. Transcoding solution vendors need to keep up with this type of technology, as well as support for track‐based media assembly and composition, frame‐accurate video and audio mixing, and track-based video and audio effects like dissolves, cuts, and fades.

To get the greatest flexibility and scalability, a transcoding solution should do the following:

• Support a diversity of formats
• Enable multiplatform transcoding
• Support an adaptive transcoding model, in which transcoding settings can adapt to the incoming source media and inherit parameters such as frame rate, audio sample rate, audio bitrate, etc.
• Support transwrapping, in which video essence data (the raw, compressed video data inside a container such as MXF or MOV) can be passed through the transcoding process without re-encoding. Transwrapping provides much faster performance in situations where you want to process audio data, such as for loudness correction or upmixing from stereo to multichannel audio, or where closed-caption data is being inserted.

More importantly, transcoding settings should be able to adapt to the incoming aspect ratio, and assign frame size and crop region to the transcoding engine based on the incoming media source. For example, you should be able to develop a single transcode setting which generates a 400×300 H.264 output file from content with a 4:3 aspect ratio, but which also generates a 400×226 H.264 output file from content with a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Or, if you know that all 4:3 content will be letterboxed, you should be able to set the transcoding to automatically assign a crop region to 4:3 content to strip off letterboxing, generate 16:9 output, and pass through 16:9 sources without cropping. This makes for an efficient, templated transcoding model because the same settings can be used for a wider range of incoming source media.

Transcoding has typically been a file‐in, file‐out workflow in which transcoding jobs are distributed around the transcoding farm as capacity becomes available. This architecture works well for bulk transcoding where the amount of content saturates the transcoding farm and you have 100% utilization of your resources.

If you have content that requires an immediate turnaround (e.g., breaking news stories, late edits to on‐air content), you can use RadiantGrid Technologies’ TrueGrid™ transcoding, which transcodes source content in parallel across all your available transcoding resources. This process distributes virtual slices of the source content across all available resources, and once these slices have been transcoded, they are reassembled to generate the final transcoded file.

Read more about RadiantGrid’s transcoding platform and their plug-in to thePlatform Remote Media Processor (RMP).

Kirk Marple is President and Chief Software Architect of RadiantGrid Technologies.

Partner News - Blog"}

Demystifying the Digital Video Ecosystem

Written by: Cheryl Kellond

Monetization is critical to digital video growth. We’ve all seen stats about consumption and spend, like these from Forrester that say, with users consuming more online video than ever, marketers are set to spend more than $1 billion on online video advertising in 2010. The upwards trend for this consumption as well as ad spend is strongly on the side of premium content.

However, if publishers aren’t able to fully monetize their online audience they risk cannibalizing traditional TV revenues…−and the content consumers really want to watch will not be available online. For premium long-form content, the goal can be the same revenue load per show as television, but the ad experience to get there needs to be more engaging and diverse so as to not negatively impact viewership.

So if the goal is engaging viewers and growing viewership as well as making sure monetization efforts hit parity with traditional TV, where does a premium publisher start? What are the right first investments to make in order to build a profitable online video business?

Here’s how publishers are using the ecosystem.

Start with:
An ad platform for publishers
An advertising platform lays the foundation for monetizing online video. A good platform will be aligned with the direct sales model most premium publishers use and will help them:

• Boost ad load and revenue with a diversity of formats that will not hamper video consumption.
• Take player engineering out of the advertising equation.
• Empower sales with new ad experiences that attract new advertisers and help close larger deals.
• Accept third-party media buys.
• Provide deep engagement and interaction metrics – beyond basic ad server tracking – that support premium CPMs and guide optimization of the total consumer experience.

There is a catch, though. Such an ad platform can cause bottlenecks for publisher operation teams implementing the range of new experiences, campaigns, and advertisers delivered by the sales force. Therefore, there must also be a tool for ad fulfillment workflow that enables scale by eliminating errors and automating time-consuming steps including:

• Tracking all phases of ad fulfillment with an audit trail for all stakeholders
• Testing ad creative within live video player environments
• Automating preparation of complete ad packages for ad serving

Because an ad platform lays the groundwork that will allow for scale and profitability, it is the logical first step for a publisher’s digital video business.

Then add:
A video ad server

Video ad servers involve a complex array of functions, not the least of which is to categorize and target ads, account for media sales rights, handle business rules around revenue sharing and billing, and optimize video ad serving and inventory management. Ad servers do inventory forecasting as well as schedule the way ads are paced. An ad server reports basic data such as click-throughs, impressions, and other simple interactions.

Some publishers have such complex media sales and content syndication business rules that they need to start with a video ad server to manage them all. However, for most publishers optimizing video ad serving doesn’t make sense as a first step because optimization works better when there is ample ad supply and many advertisers on board, which is attained through an ad platform.

Implementing the ad platform first actually “primes the pump” for ad server migration by creating the inventory and the demand that can be optimized. The ad-platform-first approach is also best if the publisher’s goal is to start monetizing digital video quickly; ad server migration can take 6-12 months to implement and requires close involvement from a publisher’s inside team. Using an ad platform to drive new revenue opportunities can deliver results in a matter of weeks.

Final step (optional):
A video ad network

Once a publisher has the right ad platform in place, ad networks can be added easily without additional integration. Video ad networks can be helpful to premium publishers for filling the 5% or so of remnant (or “unforecastable”) inventory. For smaller publishers, ad networks can help with ad sales.

Panache has an industry-unique video ad platform that has been road tested with major media and entertainment companies as the way to make their digital video businesses profitable. We are a long-standing partner of thePlatform and have a tight integration with PDK 4.0, offering publishers the most robust solution on the market. To learn more about the Panache platform, visit their site or e-mail info@panachetech.com.

Cheryl Kellond is Executive Vice President at Panache.

Want to learn more?

Come see thePlatform CEO, Ian Blaine discuss advertising opportunities in the On-Demand space in a panel at NAB.

Corporate Updates - Blog"}

Ten years working with amazing people

Today is my last day at thePlatform, and I depart with mixed emotions. I’m one of the lucky ones who have had the pleasure of working with thePlatform team for almost ten years. I’ve proudly worked side by side with a world-class team of programmers, managers, sales executives, marketers, writers, architects, project managers, lawyers, administrators, financial wizards, trainers, account managers, and the amazing dance crew in Technical Support.

The road hasn’t always been easy for thePlatform. We had to fundraise during one of the most difficult economic periods, and our technology approach, although well understood today, was ahead of its time in the early 2000s. We stayed committed through the ups and downs, largely due to our fearless leader Ian Blaine, whose strength and courage inspired us to take on tough challenges and stay positive even when our future looked dire.

Today, thePlatform is without question the most respected video management and publishing solution in the market. I thank not only the amazing team at thePlatform for getting us here, but every customer and technology partner that has joined us in this amazing journey. It is your insight, support, and continued enthusiasm that has enabled thePlatform team to stay together all these years. Together we launched the most well-known video services in the market, had a lot of fun along the way, and most importantly, created friendships that will last a lifetime.

Through the years thePlatform has developed a rich culture of collaboration “people first” philosophy and continues to focus on innovation and doing the right thing. With these characteristics so deeply embedded in the organization, thePlatform’s future is bright and exciting. I look forward to watching the team continue to lead the market. I’ll be cheering you on from the sidelines and I’ll throw my own mini-celebrations when I see every win.

I’m sad to say goodbye. I’ll miss you all and I wish you the best.

-Trish

Tech Tips - Blog"}

Automate Support for HTML 5 with Publish Profiles

As you may know, HTML 5 provides a new standard for publishing video on the web. The new video tag eliminates the dependency on a third-party technology for adding video to a web page.

But even as browsers begin to offer support for HTML 5, not all browsers support the same video file formats. For example Chrome and IE9 support the MPEG-4 format, while Firefox supports Ogg Theora, Ogg Vorbis, and WAV formats. In addition, video publishers will still need to deliver different versions of the same video files whether you’re delivering to the PC or the iPad.

thePlatform can help you automate the creation of content for HTML 5 no matter what device, browser, or outlet you are working with. With Publish Profiles, customers can build an automated series of steps to create all the files needed to deliver to an HTML 5 enabled device such as the iPad.

In fact, when we launched Publish Profiles in mpx Beta earlier this year, one of the first profiles we created for our demos was for the iPad. This helped us show how mpx Beta can quickly help our customers adapt to an ever-changing marketplace of devices, outlets, formats, and business models. Read more about mpx Beta and Publish Profiles on NewTeeVee.com.

Check out a simple player that uses HTML 5’s video tag here.

*Note, true to our ability to deliver video no matter what the outlet requires, if you are on a browser that does not support HTML 5, our demo will deliver Flash video.

HTML 5 has a lot of potential, yet clearly there are many issues that need to be resolved including delivering to various types of devices, browser compatibility, integrating different advertising and analytics solutions, and maintaining video delivery quality levels. At this point, Flash continues to be the leading video delivery format on the web today.

To help our customers stay at the cutting edge of the online video experience, we will continue to add capabilities to our system as the market evolves. To learn more about mpx and how it can help you adapt to an ever-changing landscape, check out our mpx web page.

Partner News - Blog"}

Hardworking Plug-ins for RMP

Are you using thePlatform’s Remote Media Processor (RMP) to handle the heavy-lifting tasks around file manipulation, local transcoding, DRM encryption, and file transfers? Then you should know that you can extend the capabilities of our latest RMP with a wide variety of partner plug-ins for additional RMP functions.

The most common type of plug-in is a task plug-in; the other types are transfer, analysis, and notification, all of which support a task type plug-in. An example of an RMP plug-in developed for us is the one for Rhozet’s Carbon Coder encoding engine. It supports functions such as file prefetching (which allows a Rhozet Agent to have its own local copy of the file) and reduction of thumbnail generation times on high-bitrate video files.

RMP plug-ins are easy to install. Simply bundle one or more into a single .NET assembly (DLL) and put the .DLL file into RMP’s plugins folder. When RMP starts up, it initializes the plug-in(s) in the .DLL file and updates the RMP capabilities document accordingly. Once initialization is complete, RMP can process tasks that use the new plug-in’s features.

thePlatform’s systems were designed to be open to the incorporation of third-party software so we can stay flexible as the market moves and our customers’ needs change. The RMP is no exception. We’ve fully documented RMP plug-in development in our online Technical Resource Center to make it easy for vendors to create plug-ins to streamline your workflow. Here are the current third-party plug-ins available to you:

Storage and File Transfer Integrations

• Amazon S3
• Aspera

Transcoding Engines

• Rhozet
• Flip Factory
• Windows Media Encoder
• DigitalRapids
• Flip Factory 5.0
• On2 Flix
• RadiantGrid
• Command Line Transcoders (e.g., FFmpeg, MEncoder, etc.)

Thumbnail Generation

• Rhozet
• On2 Flix
• Windows Media Thumbnail
• QuickTime Thumbnail

Content Protection

• Windows Media DRM

What extra functionality would you like to add to your RMP? Contact your Account Manager if there is an RMP development vendor with whom you would like us to collaborate on plug-in development.

Partner News - Blog"}

Plug-ins for thePlatform PDK

Completely documented and fully customizable, thePlatform’s Player Development Kit (PDK) supports a plug-in development model that enables our customers to choose from over thirty partners’ products to round out their overall online video solution. Whether you want to integrate your player with advertising, reporting and analytics, recommendations, or any other playback-enhancing solution, chances are we have several partners for you to consider. And if you are already using or considering another vendor’s solution that you wish was integrated with your player, we have a great on-boarding program for new partners. Developing a PDK plug-in can take as little as one week, and adding any partner plug-in to a player simply requires a one-line initialization script to be added to the player’s HTML code.

Online video advertising solutions that are client-supported can be integrated with the PDK through custom Flash plug-ins. The plug-ins contain custom logic to communicate with the ad provider’s network, parse their proprietary ad data formats, and insert the video ads, overlays, and banners as needed.

The PDK comes with the following advertising plug-ins.

• Ad insertion
• Doubleclick InStream
• Google AdSense for Video
• Google In-Stream Flash
• HTML banner ads
• Lightningcast
• LiveRail
• MSN
• Tremor
• VAST

Other PDK advertising plug-ins developed, supported, and that can be provided by partners include:

• Adap.tv
• Auditude
• EyeWonder
• FreeWheel
• Panache
• ScanScout
• YuMe

For reporting and analytics, the PDK includes three plug-in components (Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, and comScore Video Metrix) that can be used to provide usage tracking for your media content. Other partners who have developed plug-ins for thePlatform’s PDK that track player-side activity include:

• Conviva
• GlanceGuide
• Truviso
• TubeMogul
• Visible Measures
• Webtrends

PDK Plug-in Development

The PDK provides code samples for creating six different types of plug-ins.

• Advertising
• Clip info metadata
• Player control rack
• Player overlay
• Search
• URL rewriting

Here’s a snapshot of thePlatform’s PDK API:

Some other great features of the PDK that relate to third-party plug-ins include:

• Custom PDK plug-ins can be developed using the debugging features of Adobe Flex Builder 3 and Adobe Flash CS4. Developers can create custom plug-ins for the player control rack (custom buttons, for example).
• The Search component of the PDK accepts custom plug-ins that can be used to direct the search to a different provider.
• Canvas designers can specify the z-order (layering order) of overlay plug-ins.
• The ad insertion plug-in supports multiple URLs to insert pre-, mid-, and post-roll ads.
• The metadata URL plug-in enables the modification of release URLs.
• Player plug-ins can use the component’s internal SMIL parser to convert their SMIL files into Playlist objects.
• You can instruct the player to display your plug-ins over the control rack within the player area.
• Plug-ins can make their own feed requests and have the PDK parse the result for them.
• Player plug-ins (advertising, control, overlay, and URL) can monitor the state of and obtain information about the active Flash NetStream.
• The PDK provides an ActionScript 3 API with which Flash developers can create custom elements that integrate with the PDK’s built-in components.

This blog has more information on thePlatform’s open API.

To learn more about adding 3rd-party plug-ins to your PDK player, contact your account manager at thePlatform. If you’re not using the PDK yet, send us a note to learn more today.

Tech Tips - Blog"}

Personalize Video Management

When it comes to managing broadband video in today’s online media environment, nearly every content editor has a unique workflow. With so many ways to use digital video today, an editor has to manage, check, and approve with multiple details for all of her media objects, file types, and metadata.

With mpx Beta, we set about creating a user experience with the flexibility required to adapt to the different needs of today’s video content editors. mpx Beta includes tools to personalize a view, save shortcuts, and customize the details panels of every media object.

Personalize your view

The first step to personalization is to build a view around the media you want to see. An editor can start with a search of her library along any number of criteria in order to work with only the media objects she wants to work with. These criteria include titles, categories, workflow labels, or media IDs. Once the list is presented, the editor can then add and/or remove columns that she want to see for quick sorting and status identification.

Save a shortcut

Once the editor has the perfect view for her needs, she can save that view as a shortcut. In the future, the editor can quickly navigate to that shortcut and see just the media files she wants to work with, displayed with the columns she wants, all sorted in the order she wants.

Customize details panels

Finally, alongside every media object is the panels view. Panels are used to manage the different collections of content details, metadata, restrictions, and other relevant information about the media object.

This region is customizable as well. Administrators can change panels by adding, removing, or renaming any existing field or label. Administrators can also set up custom panels that include metadata or item details that the administrator wants to group and present to editors in a separate section.

Set up custom metadata fields.

Now see the new custom metadata panel on your media objects.

Together, these personalization features improve the content editor’s efficiency and effectiveness in managing video content.

Find out more about mpx Beta on our website, by contacting sales@theplatform.com for a trial account, or (for existing customers) by contacting your account manager today for access.

- Blog"}

Announcing PDK 4.2, the Social Media Player

Our new Player Development Kit (PDK) 4.2, the social media player, provides new features to engage your audience, new tools to distinguish your player, and new methods to ensure business policy consistency across the web.

Engage your audience with social media

Share specific clips with your friends. Just drag the slider bars to define the start and end point of the video that you want to share, and you have created a clip that can be passed along.

We’ve also added features to share video out to social media sites including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Windows Live, Yahoo! Buzz, and VodPod. You can even add new ones.

Easily create clips by selecting start and end times

Customize even more elements of your player

We’ve added new ways to distinguish your player with more customization options for layout, navigation, and interaction:

• Group menu items into submenus to clean up navigation
• Move menu items around to right, left, top, bottom, or float them
• Define different layouts for in-player vs. full-screen mode
• Create custom cards for third-party applications and build your own forms or integration
• Add your own tabs for quick movement between the cards
• Customize any button or icon
• Use new CAPTCHA controls for more reliable form submissions
• Set closed-captioning as a floating control
• Resize the video with new scaling options to resize, fit, or stretch videos inside the player region

Customize all aspects of the navigation

Ensure consistency of shared content

Finally, along with the improved audience engagement features and new tools for distinguishing players, PDK 4.2 also provides features for ensuring consistency across the social media sharing world including:

• Inclusion of advertising and business policies with any content shared with PDK players, whether it is a full video or just a clip
• Complete control over the embedded player layout to ensure consistency with your brand while allowing more flexibility in shared spaces
• Consistent Twitter sharing with built-in support for hash tags and short URLs

Check out the features of PDK 4.2 today. To take advantage of our PDK for the first time, contact sales@thePlatform.com for a trial account with thePlatform. For existing customers, visit the Technical Resource Center or contact your Account Manager today for more information.

Tech Tips - Blog"}

Adaptive Publishing with mpx Beta

One of thePlatform’s strengths over the years has always been our ability to help you get your videos to the proper destinations. We’ve helped many of the largest media companies in the world using thePlatform’s Connectors, feeds, and video player syndication tools in order to publish media to outlets all across the web and device spectrum. In the process we’ve learned what it takes to get video publishing done.

Video publishers have many elements to consider when publishing including:

• What file formats and settings are you starting with?
• What kind of format and settings does your content need to be in?
• What type of device or player you are distributing to?

Each of the elements has factors that need to considered including video format, thumbnail format, file location, content labels, and more. A smart publishing process understands each element listed above and provides you ability to adapt to whatever content situation you face.

Introducing Publish Profiles

With mpx Beta, we took all of our learnings into account when we developed Publish Profiles. Publish Profiles promise to save time and effort for our customers, while improving the overall quality and consistency of the video publishing process.

Distributing to different outlets

At the most basic level, you can use Publish Profiles to prepare all the media files that you need to publish media. With a few clicks, you can generate any video, thumbnail, or other files required to distribute to nearly any outlet including mobile devices, set-top boxes, and video destination sites.

An administrator can set up Publish Profiles for multiple outlets. In the example below, several Publish Profiles are available that the administrator of the account has already set up. An editor can then select the appropriate location for the selected media file(s), click ‘Publish,’ and the Publish Profile goes to work behind the scenes.

Start with the end-point

When we built Publish Profiles, we considered the end location first. We looked at what is needed by the outlet you are trying to reach and worked backwards. We built a system that programmatically processes through all the steps required to get videos ready for a particular destination including file creation, video transcoding, thumbnail generation, and file movement.

For example, in the Publish Profile below, the system will generate multiple versions of the same file for a variety of playback scenarios including high, medium, and low bandwidth situations, and then move those new files to the appropriate storage location.

Programming in adaptability

One of the keys to success in the Publish Profile is adaptability. Each Publish Profile works to deliver the desired file with the minimum amount of work (and re-work) by you and the system.

In the example below, the system looks first to see if the file exists in its required format. If found it moves that file to the right location and is ready to go. If not, the system then looks for a mezzanine file that it can be transcoded and moved to the right location. If there is no mezzanine file, then it looks for any other video file to work with. The whole process is all automatic and completely customizable by the creator of the Publish Profile.

Find out more about mpx Beta on our web site, by contacting sales@thePlatform.com for a trial account, or (for existing customers) by contacting your Account Manager today for access.

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

Manage Growing Content Libraries with mpx Beta

Today’s video editor has an increasing number of video assets to manage. mpx Beta offers features that make handling large content libraries less burdensome and more efficient including new tools for uploading media, a more dynamic media management environment, and helpful features for finding and filtering your videos.

New upload tools

Uploading content into mpx Beta is more efficient. Video editors can take advantage of smart tools that get large numbers of files into the right location(s) while tracking the upload progress.

• Editors often need to upload multiple videos and thumbnail images. With the mpx Beta Upload Media tool, editors can combine multiple files together into one media object. Media objects group all of the different media formats, bitrates, metadata, etc. for each piece of content, so that you can manage each piece of content as a single entity.
  
• Editors can keep an eye on the console ingest process with the My Uploads view, which shows upload progress and completion. Editors can also see errors, clear existing uploads, track down issues, repair any problems, and then re-upload as needed.
  
• In addition, any content ingested through the Ingest Service with Watch Folders or the Feed Reader appears automatically in mpx Beta.

Manage media objects

Managing large volumes of media can be tedious. The more clicks it takes to get to the details of each media object and file setting, the more effort it takes. mpx Beta’s navigation and media management tools alleviate the tiresome work of a video editor.

• Get to specific media files and properties faster with blade navigation which helps you easily zero down to the detail you need.
• Quickly preview video and verify details for each video from inside the console.
  
• Use Advanced Search features to search across a number of criteria including categories, workflow labels, and IDs.
  
• Use preset filters for managing media you’re most likely to use each day. View specific media including new uploads, recently added, unapproved, airing today, and upcoming.
  

Find out more about mpx Beta on our web site, by contacting sales@thePlatform.com for a trial account, or (for existing customers) by contacting your Account Manager today for access.

thePlatform in the press - Blog"}

Ian Blaine’s latest Beet.tv interview- ” The Promise of TV Everywhere is the Contextualization of Online Video Advertising”

Last week in New York, Ian sat down with Andy Plesser of Beet.tv to discuss TV Everywhere and Contextual Advertising. Watch the video below:

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

Staying flexible with mpx SOA

Any system that endeavors to solve the many complex business problems in broadband video management is itself going to be complex. The technologies must support each requirement on the business end, whether it’s integrating video advertising or ramping up the video library—so there are going to be a lot of moving parts.

And as you add more content, outlets, device support, and business models, you’ll increase your audience’s expectations, and you’ll have to respond quickly to new technologies to keep up with viewer demand.

What you require is a broadband video management and publishing system that supports your ability to stay flexible and scale when you need to.

An effective software architecture enables the whole business to scale during sustained growth in the number of customers, products, features, teams, and deployments. By defining a development framework for building, connecting, and reusing separately deployed services, thePlatform offers online video publishers and aggregators a reliable set of services that help them scale as their business increases in complexity, bring new services online more easily without disruption, and expand on storage resources and locations.
thePlatform meets these goals through a service-oriented architecture (SOA), in which each feature is created based upon its responsibility in the larger whole. The decision to create a particular SOA service is based on a task that has to be accomplished. The services map to business functions, working behind the scenes to orchestrate the business processes so that an organization can respond quickly to change. When built this way, you can easily ramp up any service individually when you need to.
For an overview of our core services and how they work, download our SOA White Paper.

Customer News - Blog"}

Best Wishes Gannett

For more than two years, we helped support Gannett’s online video efforts through an atypical, hybrid solution that involved both Maven Networks and thePlatform. Unfortunately, Yahoo!‘s decision to effectively dismantle Maven in 2009 created a series of anticipated issues, and Gannett decided to start anew with its back-end approach. While we wish the circumstances were different, we understand their decision and wish them continued success with their online video efforts.

As our market continues to evolve, the overall interest in thePlatform’s services has never been higher. While we’re proud to serve media companies of all kinds, we are especially proud to serve news organizations which play such a vital civic role in informing and educating the public.

So, on behalf of the entire team at thePlatform, we want to say a special thanks to our past client Gannett. And, we’d also like to thank all of the dedicated reporters and professionals at the Associated Press, BBC, the Chicago Sun Times, CNBC, NBC Local Media, PBS, and the many other news organizations that we continue support today. We are all indebted to the service that you provide to the citizens of the world.

Partner News - Blog"}

How to Turn Your Online Video Audience into Real Revenue

Written by: Mike Gaffney

With the explosive growth of online video consumption in 2009 and projected growth in 2010, content owners, advertisers, and video web sites need more than basic ad serving from their video platforms. While most web sites can run 30-second pre-rolls, they will need to do a lot more to capture a larger share of advertisers’ video spend—they’ll have to manage content-related business rules, enable multi-party sales, create new ad products, and provide metrics in real time. Following are capabilities you should look for in a video ad platform:

• Scalable, feed-based content management. Display ad servers use ad tags to target and send advertising to videos and sections (sites/zones, and keys/values) of a publisher’s network. However, manually applying asset tags adds unnecessary labor to the video management process, making it more difficult to incorporate changes, run campaigns, and account for revenues. As your media library grows, your teams will be dealing with thousands of keys and values for video assets that simply become unmanageable.

Your video ad server should be able to receive a feed directly from your content management system. A feed-based video ad server will allow you to quickly categorize and target your ads and allow you to group assets on the fly without requiring new keys and values, no matter where your video is playing.

• Multiple ad partner support. Because premium video can run on your own site or a distributor’s site, such as Fancast, MySpace or Dailymotion, your ad server must account for multiple partnerships, business requirements, revenue shares, and pricing models when making an ad decision. Having an ad serving solution that can manage and select from these rules and requirements for multiple parties will result in higher CPMs, sell-through, and overall revenue.
• Content rights management. Every premium video asset has different rights regarding distribution and sales. A video ad serving platform needs to manage these rights for you on an automated basis across all of the video’s distribution platforms. Enabling your video to be widely syndicated while maintaining all of the sales and viewing rights will allow you to maximize the value of your video assets.
• Consumer experience management. Everyone agrees that you cannot show an online viewer the same number of commercials that they’re exposed to during a similar viewing on television. So what’s the appropriate online ad load? This question has different answers depending on, for example, the genre of content, how the viewer found the clip, whether it is long-form or short-form, and the total number of videos they’ve consumed. It is imperative that your technology platform gives you the ability to experiment and measure the best ad experience for your users.

Click here to find out more information about Auditude’s advertising platform and how their plug-in to thePlatform Player Development Kit (PDK) works.

Mike Gaffney is the Chief Revenue Officer at Auditude.

Corporate Updates - Blog"}

A year of evolving technologies for a dynamic market

With the close of 2009, we’re gearing up to enter our tenth year of operations at thePlatform. Yes, that’s a long time for an online video platform to be around, but I’ve never been more excited about the market and our position in it. 2009 brought several themes into sharp focus that should make for an exciting 2010.

First, the foundation of the online video industry continued to mature. Video quality and performance improved for both live and on-demand online video, and credit goes to our friends at Adobe, Microsoft, and Move Networks. Complementing this rise in quality is a steady reduction in delivery costs across the board. The net effect is a better experience at a lower cost. I think both of these trends will continue in the right directions throughout 2010.

These trends are also key drivers of the sudden rise of “TV Everywhere” which, as a concept, took the industry by storm in 2009 and became a rallying point for operators and cable programmers who had historically struggled to find the right online strategy for premium content. Like many people in the industry, I think this is going to be a major theme in 2010, since we’ve really just begun scratching the surface in 2009. We will see concept and trial evolve to product and scale. It wouldn’t really be possible without a great, high-quality viewing experience and the software to handle the more complex business logic of efficiently and securely extending subscriber access beyond the set top. We’re excited to be a part of that, and we will continue to invest heavily in TV Everywhere throughout 2010.

The “everywhere’ part of TV Everywhere should get more interesting in 2010, as well. With the iPhone leading the way, we finally have a critical mass of devices that enable a great, more reliable consumer experience for mobile video. This will become increasingly relevant and interesting as WiMAX begins to proliferate and content rights negotiations consider mobile as a first-class citizen. Along the way, the challenges of DRM, advertising, and dead-simple authentication will have to be ironed out, but that’s what we get paid to do.

Another trend that hit big in 2009 is viral distribution on a massive scale. We of course had YouTube as an early leader, and its growth in 2009 continued to stun. One billion streams a day is something that was hard to imagine even a few years ago. But beyond YouTube, the continued growth of Facebook and the emergence of Twitter as platforms for distribution of media became real, and really interesting. It opened the door to achieving viral scale while maintaining control of media monetization, which has been a critical requirement for premium content owners. Leveraging these platforms became part of the playbook for media companies, and I think those playbooks will become progressively sophisticated in 2010. Making this easy and fruitful for media company businesses is going to be increasingly important, and we’re definitely treating this as a high priority in the coming year.

Overall, these trends create a very dynamic, exciting market that is sure to continue evolving rapidly. I’m happy to say that we’ve never, ever taken our foot of off the R&D pedal, and that many of the longer-term projects that we’ve been investing in will come to fruition at a time when they are needed and more relevant than ever. We’ve combined our experience and our development prowess to make sure that the next decade is even better than the first.

Ian Blaine is CEO of thePlatform, and SVP of Content Publishing, Comcast Interactive Media

Partner News - Blog"}

Audience measurement for any platform

If your online video business relies on generating revenue via advertising, then ask yourself these questions:

• What are the best video sites to reach my desired audience?
• Who is watching video on my site? How engaged are they?
• How do I compare with key competitors in terms of unique viewers, growth, and video viewing time spent per consumer?
• Do I reach the same audiences as my competitors, or is there a niche audience that is unique to me?

If you don’t know the answers to any or all of these questions, fret not because help is on the way. The stars are beginning to align for the ad-supported revenue model for online video, and there is a constellation of technologies that can measure online audience behavior just as TV audiences are measured.

New online measurement options from the world of TV

Both comScore and Nielsen can now help you track not only your web site visitors but, more specifically, the audience of your video content. Their syndicated online video measurement services combine panel and census technologies, and provide end-to-end accounting of audience size, demographic composition, engagement, and competitive activity. Both can also provide detailed demographic and behavioral data about audience members who have opted to register on the site, as well as off-site behavior via tracking cookies.

In a recent article about Nielsen’s cross-platform audience measurement initiative, Nat Worden of Dow Jones writes, “…as online video usage on sites like Hulu and TV.com is exploding with the rise of digital media…advertisers and TV network owners have voiced frustration over the industry’s inability to measure audiences effectively across media platforms.”

Ironically, the Internet lends itself to more accurate and insightful audience measurement than traditional television. And unlike traditional television, online video can provide advertisers with direct consumer engagement/interaction opportunities as well.

Considerations in selecting a measurement vendor

The right reporting and analytics partner can give you the data you need to apply to your revenue goals:

• Attract higher ad rates and increase ad-based revenue by showing ads to the highest-performing segments of your audience.
• Package your audience for maximum profitability — even audiences as small as 500 unique visitors.
• Provide media planners with detailed, easy-to-read audience profiles over which you retain complete control.

There are core capabilities you should look for that increase your likelihood of reaching these goals:

• Objectivity: You’ll want a system that is technology- and platform- agnostic so that all online video are measured in the same way.
• Accuracy: Every tagged stream should be identified and measured for total measurement and reporting precision.
• Granularity: To get reports all the way down to the level of a specific video, including program type and name, every tagged stream should be measured.
• Flexibility: Look for technology that easily adapts to changes in the industry, applications, platforms, protocols, or streaming technologies.
• Specific reports:
  • Viewers: Projected number of U.S. home/work users who viewed the stream
  • Streams: Number of videos viewed
  • Demographics: Who is viewing the content
  • Day-parting: Which periods of the day your video streams are getting the most play
  • Cached content, peer-to-peer programs, and digital rights-managed (DRM) video streams, if appropriate for your business.

How measurement and reporting tools work

Most tools for measuring online video audiences work the same way: The video publisher tags their video players or streams with a short piece of code, which triggers the viewer’s browser to ping the audience measurement server with the relevant details- such as the video’s content and origin-when the stream is viewed.

thePlatform’s Player Development Kit (PDK) includes a plug-in component that can report media views to comScore Video Metrix. The plug-in configuration uses a combination of settings from within the player canvas and from custom fields on the content owner and media items. The PDK also supports Nielsen VideoCensus (link opens in a .pdf) via GlanceGuide’s plug-in. To learn more, contact your account manager at thePlatform.

Jordan Friedman is Senior Manager of Business Development at thePlatform.

Customer News - Blog"}

PBS grows younger audience with online video portal

For a long time, PBS has had great success pulling in older audiences, providing sophisticated content for more substantive TV viewing.

But the organization still must attract younger adult viewers and solidify their loyalty to secure ongoing support. This year they’ve had great success in expanding their younger audience through their online video portal that thePlatform helped launch. At the NewTeeVee Live conference last week, PBS Interactive SVP Jason Seiken reported that 48% of the site’s visitors are under 35, and visitors average 26 minutes on a stream. In addition, the numbers of video views are growing 80% every month.

thePlatform’s system helps PBS share and deliver content on a large scale, offer greater programming variety, and expand the audience for both local and national PBS sites. Check out our PBS Case Study, where you’ll learn about thePlatform’s solutions for PBS’ content ingest, publishing workflow, national and member station players, licensing, and underwriting.

Read more about Jason Seiken’s presentation on the NewTeeVee site, and visit PBS Video to see the video portal in action.

thePlatform in the press - Blog"}

Rogers Gives Canadians Their ‘TV Everywhere’ With New VOD Service - PaidContent.org discusses Rogers’ “TV Everywhere” initiatives

Canadian cable giant Rogers Communications has launched an ad-supported online video service that THR is calling a “Canadianized Hulu.” But we think it’s more like one of the first viable attempts to launch a “TV Everywhere” service-since the premium, ad-supported video content will only be accessible to Rogers’ 2.3 million cable subscribers. People will be able to watch the content on any computer after they’ve been verified as a Rogers customer; the company says it’s working with white-label video tech provider thePlatform for the subscriber verification.

Read the rest of this article at PaidContent.org

Customer News - Blog"}

More Programming Networks, More TV Service Providers, More Ways

I am excited to share three pieces of news with you today.

Here at thePlatform, we are extremely proud to serve as the online video management system for most of the largest cable TV service providers in United States, including: Cablevision, Cox, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable. We’re also excited to announce that we’re working with Rogers, Canada’s leading provider, on an online video initiative and look forward to sharing more details when we can.

We’re equally proud of the fact that, in just the past 2 months alone, more than 20 individual programming networks have turned to thePlatform. These include, many regional networks within Fox Sports Networks; E!; G4; Style; several regional networks within Comcast Sports Group; Travel Channel Media; Big Ten Network; and others yet to be named.

In recent weeks, there has also been a great deal of discussion about “TV Everywhere,” the effort to extend paid TV subscription content to the Web. And, we’re pleased to be involved with the back-end of Comcast’s On Demand Online trial. To date, however, most of the discussion about “TV Everywhere” has centered on the initiatives of TV service providers. But we’re broadening that today.

We’ve introduced a new set of new features for programming networks and content owners to provide “TV Everywhere” capabilities on their own Web sites, while preserving their financial and content rights arrangements with TV service providers. The new features provide solutions like an authentication adapter, authorization of video playback, adaptive content discovery and monetization, and much more. You can read the full details in our press release.

If you would like to learn more about these services, please give us a call.

Marty Roberts
VP of Marketing

Customer News - Blog"}

thePlatform Teams Up with FOX Sports Network to Handle Online Video Management

Few things excite people’s passions like sports, and few brands are as well known for sports as Fox Sports Network. Through its 19 owned-and-operated regional networks, FSN serves as the TV home to more than half of all MLB, NHL, and NBA teams. And soon, more of their great programming will be coming to the web to keep viewers connected with their favorite teams.

Here at thePlatform, we’re proud to have been selected as the centralized back-end video management system for the web sites of FSN’s regional networks. In addition, these programming networks will use our video player technology to create custom viewing experiences for their online audiences. It’s a winning combination all around.

Whether you need an online video business that’s supported by advertising, subscription services, downloads, or some combination of each, thePlatform is here to help you “get your game on.”

Tech Tips - Blog"}

3 Ways to Monetize Video

Flexibility for monetizing broadband video

Running an Internet video site isn’t the same as running an Internet video business. Now, more than ever, content companies need the versatility to monetize video in multiple ways. At thePlatform, our job is to give you the tools to expand your business in a way that’s right for you. Whether you need advertising options, a subscription service, pay-per-view, or some combination, thePlatform has proven solutions in the market today.

Advertising

Today, most of the billions of online video views that we manage for customers are monetized through advertising. With our system, you can easily set ad positions, formats, patterns, and delivery policies. You can also set primary and secondary ad servers or networks to ensure a continuous flow of ads to your video player’s content. In addition, thePlatform can help you easily syndicate to a wide variety of destination sites to extend your reach.

thePlatform also provides a vast partner plug-in ecosystem for our video players by integrating with most of the major online video advertising servers and networks. Our integrations include:

• Adap.tv
• Auditude
• BlackArrow
• BrightRoll
• DoubleClick
• EyeWonder
• Google AdSense for Video
• Lightningcast
• LiveRail
• Panache
• ScanScout
• Tremor Media
• YuMe
• and more…

Subscriptions

In addition to advertising tools, thePlatform also enables subscription revenue streams for your content. Create your own subscription business with end user accounts, payment gateway integrations, and shopping cart tools. We have numerous examples of customers with successful subscription businesses, including new customer Big Ten Network.

You can also partner with a TV Service Provider as they roll out TV Everywhere sites and services to their existing subscribers. thePlatform simplifies the integration between your and your partner’s systems, enabling the playback of premium or entitled content to authorized consumers on your web site.

If subscriptions make sense to you, we’re ready to help.

Pay-per-view or purchase

Finally, thePlatform provides tools for powering a media business based on pay-per-view or content purchases. In addition to end user accounts, payment gateways, and shopping cart integrations to handle the actual transactions, we also provide tools for delivering and securing that content on the end users’ devices: We support both encrypted streaming delivery, and the download and storage of content that’s protected by digital rights management (DRM) software. We do this today for iN Demand Networks and others, and we can do it for you.

To learn more about thePlatform’s monetization options for your video business, contact your Account Manager. To learn more about our partner networks’ advertising, commerce, and digital rights solutions, visit our partner pages.

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

PDK 4.1.1 Arrives

The newest Player Development Kit offers a new video bitrate selection control and new plug-ins for reporting and advertising solutions.

Give viewers the power to manage bitrates

If your video has multiple bitrate versions available, our new bandwidth selector control provides a visual cue for the version being shown. For FMS 3.5 servers, by default we’ll automatically detect the optimal bandwidth, and the indicator will show the current state as the bandwidth shifts. Viewers can also click the control and manually switch bitrates in real time.

New plug-ins for reporting and advertising

We’ve added plug-ins for the following partner solutions:

• comScore: Track user activity with comScore’s Video Metrix online audience reporting in order to provide high quality, third-party validated measurement.
• Google’s In-Stream Flash component: Access both DoubleClick In-Stream ads and Google AdSense for Video ads. Using this plug-in allows allocation of the best ad from either system, or to use one as a failover for the other.
• Generic server-side ad wrapping: Wrap content clips in ad server URLs that then get passed to other ad plug-ins for processing. You’ll never need to worry about wrapper playlists again.

More flexible category lists

Finally, we’ve opened up the category list control to enable additional ‘virtual’ categories within the list. These virtual categories can include multiple feeds in a single list, and they can be specified in any order or at any level of the list display.

For more details on the release and instructions on implementing these features, see the release notes in our Technical Resource Center, or contact us today.

Tech Tips - Blog"}

Use mpsConnect to distribute content across 3 screens

As we posted late last month, thePlatform now provides tools for streaming videos to the iPhone. For years, our media publishing system (mps) has enabled content companies to publish video across 3 screens: mobile devices, the web, and TV set-top boxes. As you look for ways to manage your digital video assets centrally, our players, feeds, and Connectors stand ready to assist you.

With mpsConnect, we take care of all aspects of content distribution including ingest, transcoding, metadata management, and policy management. mpsConnect distributes media through feeds, players, and Connectors. Our dynamic feeds service subscribes to content categories and automatically updates the available content. It supports the XML, JSON, RSS, and MRSS feed formats. Our players can be embedded in a single URL with multiple sharing tools. And our Connectors will publish your content directly to sites with unique content delivery.

Web support

With our embeddable video players, feeds, and Connectors, you can distribute content over the Internet to personal computers. Connector web outlets include:

• YouTube
• MSN Video
• Yahoo! Video
• Fancast
• iTunes
• MySpace
• TubeMogul
• Metacafe
• AOL video
• Veoh
• Blinkx

Mobile support

You can also use our distribution tools to send content to mobile devices such as iPhones and Windows Mobile phones. Our mobile outlets include:

• AT&T
• Verizon
• Helio
• Mobitv
• Sprint
• GoTV Networks

TV support

In order to deliver content to IP TV platforms, we format and send content depending on the requirements of each set-top-box network. As with mobile and PC platforms, we’ve distributed content to IP TV outlets that accept media in standard formats (such as MRSS). In addition, we’ve worked with customers to build Connector applications for set-top-boxes that require unique or specific content formats. If there is a particular set-top-box that you’re trying to reach, or for more information on which platforms we’ve integrated with, contact us.

To learn more about mpsConnect and how it can help distribute your content, visit our mpsConnect page or contact your account manager.

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

Watch Folders Now Support SFTP

Written by: Nathan Rohm

Our customers asked for it and we delivered. One of our most popular new products, the Ingest Service, now supports Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) for Watch Folders. This means that Watch Folders can now be deployed in even more places for our customers, including within secure networks that are behind corporate firewalls.

About the Ingest Service

The Ingest Service offers a faster, easier, and more flexible method for ingesting content into thePlatform’s system. You can use one of two methods with the Ingest Service:

• The Feed Reader, which connects to your content feed and ingests content automatically, along with all its corresponding metadata.
• Watch Folders, FTP locations into which you place files for automatic ingest into mps, along with a file that contains all the corresponding metadata to be applied to the content in the folder. Files can be in nearly any format including XML, XLS, and MRSS.

Adapting to Your Workflow

The Ingest Service can be used for ingesting new content or updating existing content in your system. It is a highly scalable service for which we build Adapters that will map to customers’ metadata schemas. With its error checking and bulk uploading features, it provides added peace of mind for the ingest process. And now that Watch Folders supports SFTP, it is deployable in even more scenarios.

Contact your Account Manager if you would like more information about the Ingest Service.

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Web CMS and VMS:  Improving workflow and content integration

Written by: Claudio Canive

If presenting video content to your online audience is the core of your business model, then chances are you are using a traditional web content management system (CMS) and a video management solution (VMS) in tandem. Both systems are highly specialized for what they do, but until recently they haven’t been well integrated, leading to overly manual processes, sub-optimal workflow, and degraded consumer experience.

Typically, the CMS is not even aware of the video content that is managed in the VMS. The CMS stores and manages articles and images while the VMS manages video, and never the twain shall meet. This situation results in problems for both content editors and the audience.

From a content editor’s perspective, lack of communication between the CMS and VMS creates a more complex workflow:

• When a content editor adds video through a VMS that is entirely disconnected from the web CMS, they can’t access individual video objects for integration into article-based content. Although the published videos will appear in the embedded players, content editors must copy and paste the VMS embed code into the article WYSIWYG editor.
• Content categories are crucial to managing online video content. Using unintegrated systems, content editors might not have the option to add, edit, or delete categories via the CMS interface and have those changes reflected in the VMS as well.
• Content editors need the ability to easily append a video to a story or blog, whereby the video is placed in a sidebar adjacent to the text without needing to copy and paste embed code. Unintegrated systems might not allow for this.

Apart from being clumsy and time consuming for content editors, lack of integration also poses an issue for the visitors. Because the video content does not live in the CMS, it’s generally unavailable via site search and requires a video-specific search tool in the player itself. Wouldn’t your audience prefer to discover related textual and video content in a single, all-site search function?

A fully integrated CMS-plus-VMS lets editors ingest video content through either system’s interface. References to the video objects are placed into the CMS database so that the videos could be attached and formatted automatically into article-based content. Given the presence of the references in the CMS database, the videos could be indexed for search. The integration streamlines the workflow for the content editor, removes the requirement for a federated search mechanism, and enhances the experience for visitors.

The convergence of web CMS and VMS is still in its infancy, but with the increasing need for immediacy in web publishing, you’ll want to ensure that your tools play well together so that all of your content (text, images, and videos) can be seamlessly managed by your team and consumed by your audience.

To find out more about how Platformic has integrated their CMS with thePlatform’s online video solutions, see the Platformic partner page on thePlatform’s web site.

Claudio Canive is the Chief Executive Officer of Platformic.

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

Build your own iPhone web app

As you may know, delivering mobile content sometimes requires specialized development resources. And if you’re developing a custom application for the iPhone, going through the Apple App Store approval process can add extra work.

thePlatform wanted to make the mobile development process easier by providing something that our customers could use to get their feet wet delivering mobile content without having to build a traditional iPhone custom application themselves.

Using our Feeds Service, a little JavaScript, and the iPhone’s built-in web browser, we built a sample web application that saves our customers time and effort. Customers can use the sample code (provided by thePlatform) combined with the iPhone’s user interface Framework (iUI) to deliver a clean and customizable viewing experience. Visit our Technical Resource Center where you can download a package containing the following:

• Two separate examples to get you started building your own app. Each example uses custom JavaScript that interacts with our Feeds Services’ JSON interface and the iUI library.
• A browser-based (sample) web app. Since it is web-based, your customers do not need to download anything in order to make it work on their iPhones.
• An iPhone-like user experience that is based on the native iPhone app look and feel. To customize it further, you can change the CSS for different colors and background images.
• Template iPhone transcoding profile. The media files will be formatted and encoded specifically for iPhone viewing.

Log in to our Technical Resource Center today to learn more about our iPhone web app sample code. To see a working demo, type this URL into your iPhone browser:

http://theplatform.comiphone/index.html#_home

• View our policies on sample code here.

business

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Increase newsletter audience and site traffic with embedded video

Written By: Gal Chanoch

Including video in your email can be a great way to increase audience engagement with your content. Streamed video in email enables true multi-channel digital marketing, where marketers can mix the web “pull” and the email “push” video tactics to drive more user interaction.

But adding video to email can be problematic. One particular challenge of embedding video in email is that, because many security attacks can be carried through JavaScript and Flash and harm the client, ISPs often ban video from email. To overcome this challenge, you’ll need a secure sending mechanism that works across varied ISPs and webmail providers. Goodmail Systems, a newly integrated partner of thePlatform, offers a solution that can meet that need.

Goodmail’s CertifiedVideo delivers messages with thePlatform’s Player Development Kit (PDK) players directly to the recipient’s inbox, without ISP restrictions. Your video plays when the email is opened, and just as with any other HTML email message you send, message content is completely configurable.

With thePlatform and Goodmail’s combined solution, you can use your existing CDN, ad-servers, and analytics solutions, without making any changes to thePlatform’s media publishing system.

Why video in email?

Reusing existing video assets. You’ll want the implementation to dovetail with your broader platform solution so that the existing Flash-based video assets can be used “as is” within the email properties.

Using existing infrastructure. The video-in-email solution should be interoperable with your existing CDN, ad-servers, and analytics solutions, without requiring any changes to the existing enterprise video infrastructure.

Multichannel planning flexibility. Enterprise marketing organizations who are deploying video solutions can integrate video into email as part of their workflow process.

Expanding existing monetization. Video can be a great way of monetizing email campaigns. Any existing sponsorship or advertising strategy can be easily extended into email campaigns.

To find out more about how Goodmail Systems and thePlatform can help you deliver video via email to your audience, see the Goodmail Systems partner page on thePlatform’s web site.

Gal Chanoch is the Vice President of Product Management at Goodmail Systems and has over 20 years of experience in engineering, marketing, and business development in Fortune 100 and startup companies.

partners, syndication

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

Maximize ad revenues with Acudeo ad policies

Managing ad policies can be a headache. With so many ad formats, networks, servers, pattern options, and playback options to integrate and manage, many video providers find it difficult to conceptualize and optimize the entire ad policy process. Within this process, video providers are essentially looking for new ways to:

a) Find more revenue opportunities when ad servers are unable to fill an ad positions due to timeouts, category mismatches, or missing inventory.
b) Reduce the extra costs of integrating with multiple ad servers and ad networks, maintaining those integrations, and getting them to work within their player(s).

A complete advertising management solution

We now offer Acudeo ad policy management tools through our partnership with Tremor Media, a leading online advertising network. With the Acudeo ad policies service, we help customers increase their revenue from advertising while decreasing the headache of setting up and managing a vast ecosystem of advertising partners.

Acudeo Benefits

• The service provides tools that let you experiment with different ad servers and ad networks. To maximize the monetization potential of your content, you can even switch to different networks or set primary and failover ad sources in order to ensure uninterrupted ad delivery.
• Acudeo is pre-integrated with most of the leading ad networks and ad servers, saving you time and effort by allowing you to take immediate advantage of its benefits.
• Set ad pattern policies for pre-, mid-, and post-roll ads at the player and video level, which saves time and reduces ad playback administration. In addition to Acudeo’s standard Compatible Ad Source format, other supported ad formats include iFrame Banner Ad Tags, PointRoll’s TickerBoy, and the Digital Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) format as distributed by the IAB
• An ever-evolving list of integrations helps you future-proof your ad platform. Supported ad networks include Tremor Media, Advertising.com (LightningCast), BrightRoll Video Network, Google AdSense for Video, ScanScout, SpotXchange, ValueClick. Supported ad servers include DoubleClick DART for Publishers, Doubleclick InStream, Open AdStream (OAS), Atlas Ad Manager, Atlas Media Console, AdTech Helios IQ, and more. For a complete list, contact your account manager.

Customers have the option to easily join the Tremor Media Video Ad Network to further monetize their video inventory. Learn more about the Acudeo ad policies service on our web site, or contact your Account Manager today.

business, advertising, partners

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Effective Online Video Advertising

Our friends at ScanScout recently paid us a visit at our headquarters in Seattle to show us the updated integration between their ad solution and our Player Development Kit (PDK) 4 via a simple plug-in. It was great to get their perspective on how to build a successful ad-revenue business for professionally produced online video.
One thing that became clear during our conversation is that there is no magic bullet. A number of factors have to come together for you to get the most out of your online video advertising plan. Cash and content are the two kings, and you clearly need to drive traffic to your site and create a sticky user experience in order to succeed., But specific to advertising, here are the four big factors:

1. Ad avails: the amount of inventory you have to sell to advertisers

2. Ad Fill rate: the percentage of ad avails filled by actual, paid advertising

3. Ad format mix: the combination of interstitials (pre-roll, mid-roll, etc.), overlays (lower-third, bugs, etc.), and companion banners (static, rich media, etc.) that is right for your site

4. Ad targeting: two types a. Contextual targeting: leveraging metadata about your content to select and serve ads that are contextually relevant, and/or, b. Behavioral targeting: using information that you know about your general audience (or individuals) to select and serve up ads (targeting ads to specific audience members)

In this post, we’ll just focus on the first three and how they relate to each other, as comparing the two types of ad targeting is an interesting topic by itself.

Ad avails

Lets start with ad avails, which are the intersection between fill rate and format mix. Aside from adding more ad slots, you can also add more ad formats (i.e., variations of interstitial and overlay) to the mix, which would, of course, increase your ad avails. Keep in mind the other rather obvious result which is that your fill rate will initially drop until you sell the new inventory. Each publisher must strike a delicate balance to not alienate their audience with too frequent or too repetitious an ad pattern, but, in general, having more ad inventory to sell is a good problem to have if you subscribe to an ad-supported business model.

Fill rate

Fill rate directly affects a publisher’s effective CPM (eCPM), which is ad earnings divided by streams multiplied by 1000, or basically, the revenue earned per one thousand streams. If your fill rate is low – if you’re not populating those ad spaces – then your video isn’t working as hard as it could. thePlatform has a number of fantastic ad network partners like ScanScout that can help you fill those ad spots, and we also have several ad technology partners like LiveRail and adap.tv that can help you manage multiple ad sources.

Ad format mix

Publishers understandably want to know which formats garner the best responses from viewers. Pre-, mid-, or post-roll? Overlays or companions? Once again, there’s no fancy magic bullet. Use a mix, and see which formats drive click-thru rate. Experimentation is allowed., and, as ScanScout explained to us, there are other ways that an ad can engage your audience, such as directly asking for demographic information or the answer to a product question. If your content is short-form and pre-rolls are your only ad format, then you can literally double your ad avails simply by adding a lower-third overlay to the mix.

So what is effective?

There’s a new Google and MediaVest “neuromarketing” study that does attempt to evaluate ad effectiveness based on viewers’ brainwave activity, eye-tracking, and skin response. If you’ve wondered about the efficacy of overlay ads in terms of audience engagement, it’s worth a read. And even more recently, Will Richmond wrote about MTV Networks’ recent study on the same subject in this article.

The path to the greatest ad revenue is multifaceted. We encourage you to review all relevant data and options available to you to make the best decision for your online video business. And we encourage publishers to work with their advertisers to develop a mix of ad creatives and formats that generates the best audience response.

On our web site you can get more information about how our partners’ ad solutions are integrated with thePlatform’s Player Development Kit and how they can help publishers generate greater ad revenue. For an explanation of how thePlatform integrates advertising technologies, read our Advertising White Paper.

business, partners, advertising

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Relevance increases video consumption and engagement

Written by: David Maher Roberts

For the last several years, the online video world has focused on solving the challenges of how to get content digitized and distributed. But there’s been a lack of focus on figuring out how to increase consumer demand for your video.

Making every single video in a catalogue available is a good start, but that by itself will not increase the likelihood that your audience will watch more of your videos.
The question is: How to digitize as much of your catalogue as possible (i.e., supply) and offer individual users the content they are most likely to enjoy watching at that right moment in time (i.e., demand)?

The answer: It’s all about relevance. The more relevant the content choices (recommendations, charts, navigation, search) the more likely the user will engage and consume.
The proof that relevant recommendations drive consumption and engagement: Two-thirds of Netflix movie rentals and 35% of Amazon sales are driven by recommendations, and even YouTube has been talking about the need for smarter recommendations to drive consumption. My experience at The Filter is that online video publishers see an immediate and significant lift in video consumption, dwell time, and return visits when they replace editorial recommendations or popularity lists with more relevant recommendations using our algorithms.

How to make content more relevant to me, here and now

The key to relevance is data. Every single video-related service has two types of data: (1) catalogue-related data (description, metadata) and (2) consumption-related data (viewed, shared, rated, saved, commented). The more data there is, the better, but even modest amounts of data will deliver more relevant content to your consumers.

Capturing and logging catalogue and consumption data in a meaningful way is one of the best investments any video service can make today, because it makes relevance and personalization easier in the future. Luckily, data about consumers’ ever-changing preferences in video has never been easier to capture and understand. And more importantly, it’s never been easier to use this data to increase engagement, traffic, and revenue.

Sure, there is a lot of data and you need to use clever algorithms and have an acute understanding of how to use the math and data to deliver the best possible results. But there are companies like ours that focus on this every day and have built solutions for you to choose from.

Recommendation services like The Filter offer a lightweight and simple beaconing service to capture and analyze every bit of interaction with the content. Once this data is properly identified and logged, it can then be used by a recommendation and relevance engine. Using A.I techniques, the engine grinds through the catalogue and consumption data, and then works out the connections between every single piece of content in the catalogue based on individual audience members’ behaviour and consumption. This mathematical model delivers a list of relevant recommendations that go together in order of most-likely match based on consumption data from all users.

For example, if you watch a video of a kitten falling off a sink (yes – aren’t they funny…) on YouTube, the list of relevant videos that sits on the right would typically have lots of other kitten-related videos. This is because in simple terms, this list is a popularity chart using keywords as a filter. This type of recommendation leads to “kitten fatigue,” as there are only so many kitten videos you can watch in one session. Using the relevance model based on consumption and behaviour, however, the list of related videos includes those that have the highest probability of being watched after the kitten video, thereby offering more relevant rather than just similar content.

So presenting lists of recommended content that are more relevant to the consumer is better than an editorial- or popularity-based approach, but it is just the first step. Recommended content can be filtered to match the end user’s tastes and activities, can remove videos that he/she has already watched, or suggest video topics that he/she has a propensity to watch.

A fully personalized video service that takes into account tastes, past activity, and context is seen as the nirvana of relevance right now. It is very achievable as long as video services take the following steps to get there:

1. Identify and log catalogue and all types of consumption data as soon as possible
2. Plug in a proven and robust recommendation and relevance service and deliver more relevant content recommendations
3. Measure the increase in video views by individual consumers
4. Filter the list to offer personalized recommendations
5. Measure the increase again!

David Maher Roberts is CEO of The Filter, a recommendations & relevance platform for digital media content. The Filter is backed by music legend Peter Gabriel.

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Tech Tips - Blog"}

Exporting from the Player Designer to the PDK

Get a head start on player development with the Player Designer

When customers first start using thePlatform’s services to develop players, many of them begin with our Player Designer. The Player Designer provides customers with:

• A quick way to get started without requiring any coding ability. All you need is to know is how to use a web browser and to have a general idea of how you want your player to look.
• A complete WYSIWYG player development environment that lets you see your player as you build it.
• The ability to customize the look and feel by setting the player’s color scheme and design skin, player details, layout, feed information, and much more.
• Plug-ins and other components to take advantage of our expansive partner network. Player Designer plug-ins include the ability to work with analytics, advertising, CDN, and many more partner companies and services.
• A player that can be published to multiple locations with a single URL.

When you reach the limits of the Player Designer, export it to the PDK

At some point the options available in the Player Designer may no longer fulfill all your needs. Instead of starting all over from scratch, we make it easy for you to take your existing Player Designer player, export it, and start customizing it with the PDK. To export a Player Designer player:

1. Click Players to see the list of players.

2. In the list of players, click Get Link for the player you want to export.
The live player appears in a new browser window or tab.

3. In the browser menu, click File, and then click either Save As (Internet Explorer) or Save Page As (Firefox).
The Save dialog box appears.

4. Choose a location and name for your player, make sure that the Save as Type box shows Web Page, HTML only, and then click Save.

Freely customize your PDK player

If you haven’t already, you’ll need to download and install the PDK. Once your player has been exported into the PDK, you have a lot more options available for customizing it, including the following:

• Remove or reposition player components.
• Add multiple copies of a single component to a canvas at one time.
• Add custom features using JavaScript
• Use Akamai and Limelight live streaming.
• Group components within a canvas with event scopes, which define limits for event handling between components.
• Configure the control rack in the player by updating the layout XML data file.
• Change the names of the Most Popular and All automatic categories.
• Add plug-ins that integrate third-party functionality not available in the Player Designer.

To learn more about the Player Designer and the PDK, check out the mpsPresent section of our web site.

For more information on how to download and install the PDK, check out our Player Development Kit documentation. You can find out the full details and required player modifications for exporting your Player Designer player into a PDK player in the article entitled Exporting a player from the Player Designer to the Player Development Kit.

player designer, player development kit,

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

More Advertising and Tracking Options with PDK 4.1

Along with improved live streaming features, PDK 4.1 also offers more advertising plug-ins, integrations, and tracking features.

Better ad tracking and counting

We’ve increased the flexibility of our advertising selection logic. You can now set the Flash cookie that stores ad counts to be unique per site, per player, or even per user. You can also reset the ad count in custom code at run time. This lets you track ad patterns based on a particular viewing session at a more granular level.

We’ve also added a new tool to track impressions separately from the source URLs. Send information back to third parties with as many impression URLs as you want so that your ad providers know whether or not an ad has actually been displayed.

New companion ad plug-in

To support HTML companion ads within the player region, we’ve created a new plug-in type and a sample plug-in that take HTML banner links, parse them into an image, add a hyperlink and an impression URL, and then render them.

Robust VAST support

thePlatform leads the industry with some of the most complete support for VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) standards available. We now support the VAST metafile standard, which is an International Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard format for ad servers that covers video, banner, and overlay ads. VAST also provides standards for tracking events and wrappers which point to other ads. You can find more information about the VAST standard on the IAB web site.

SEO-friendly embeddable URLs

We make it easy to include search-engine-friendly titles in your player URLs. When viewers share your video, these links are ranked more effectively by search engines, which can drive more customers to your content. You just need to add “{title}” to your player URL, and we’ll automatically substitute the video’s title using standard SEO rules.

Support for Google AdSense for Video

Our new plug-in for Google AdSense for Video supports any of Google’s ad formats including videos, overlays, and end-caps displaying ad text, images, or videos.

Google AdSense for Video pre-roll

Google AdSense for Video overlay

For more details on the release and instructions on implementing these features, see the release notes in our Technical Resource Center. Visit our help site to download the latest PDK.

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

PDK 4.1 Improves Live Streaming, Playback, and APIs

The newest iteration of the PDK (4.1) offers enhancements and new features and functionality for video controls, live video streaming error recovery, and our APIs.

Improved live streaming error recovery

The PDK already supports Flash Media Streaming Server 3.5 (FMS 3.5), but we’ve added a new feature that automatically helps the player recover from any adaptive streaming errors. If the preferred stream is unavailable or fails, the failover function switches to the next available best fit for a smooth viewing experience. If you’re using FMS 3.5 for live streaming, you’ll see your videos’ error recovery greatly improve.

More control options

When a user hovers over the playback (scrubber) bar, they’ll see a tooltip that shows the corresponding time in the video. You can also have this tooltip always appear, and remove the time read-out in the controls, for optimal use of horizontal space. The look and feel of this tooltip is completely customizable.

In addition, you can now set a hovering period for floating controls when the video first loads, and can set how long the controls are displayed after the cursor leaves the video region.

API updates for more feed parsing, URL tracking, and video region events

We’ve added more control of the video experience with improved feed parsing, URL tracking, and the ability to better capture video region actions:

• You can now parse Feeds Service responses within a plug-in, for either releases or categories
• You can add your own custom “beacon” tracking URLs to any video set, to fire based on percent complete, absolute time, or playback events.
• We’ve added more control over actions on the video region. You can now capture when a user clicks, rolls over, or rolls out of the video region.

For more details on the release and instructions on implementing these features, see the release notes in our Technical Resource Center. Visit our help site to download the latest PDK.

Inside thePlatform - Blog"}

The TAM Service Has You Covered

What is the TAM Service?

The Technical Account Manager (TAM) Service is a valuable added resource that thePlatform provides to customers who need more specialized support for their broadband video solution needs. While all new customers get a chance to experience the TAM Service for a limited time after sign up, and all customers get access to our 24/7 support, those customers with deeper technical and video business needs may choose to add ongoing TAM Services to their account.

Technical Account Managers want you to achieve your business goals, not just resolve technical issues. Your TAM is a specifically designated resource who serves as a single point of contact for all your needs with thePlatform. TAMs can therefore provide a consistent source of knowledge and advocacy as your business grows and develops over time. In addition, TAMs are focused on solving problems in a holistic way by offering a broad toolset of insight and experience to clients. Not only are they experts in thePlatform technology, our TAMs are all trained in the various tools and solutions offered by our vast partner network.

TAM Services Include

TAMs provide a wide variety of services and insight into critical development areas including:

• Need a custom video player? Your TAM can help you to plan, build, and deploy your own Player Development Kit (PDK) solution that fits the unique needs of your business. In order to bring your video player to life, your TAM can guide your team through the process of designing your layout, skinning the look and feel, and adding any plug-ins that you require.
• Configuring a Ingest Workflow: Need a custom ingest solution? Your TAM will help you set up your own video content Ingest Service implementation using tools such as Watch Folders or the Feed Reader to automate and accelerate the ingest process.
• Managing Content Preparation: Whether it is configuring your metadata schemas, setting up a Transcoding Service solution, setting custom business policies, configuring advertising patterns, configuring your own CDN Network (or using our own mpsManage CDN and Storage Services); your TAM will help you get your content formatted and hosted and ready to roll.
• Choosing a Content Syndication Strategy: Need to get your content to a specific outlet or destination? Your TAM will work with you to make sure you have the right syndication strategy to get your content seen. We’ll help you work with our various mpsConnect content syndication options including player syndication, connectors, and feeds.
• Working with Partners: Your TAM will help you find the right partner for whatever needs you may have. TAMs have experience working with a broad range of technology providers in the arenas of video advertising, reporting, content delivery networks, community tools, transcoding, asset management, and more who have all integrated with thePlatform. Your TAM’s knowledge of your specific needs is an invaluable asset to help you select, integrate, and deploy your partner-enabled solutions. To view our extensive partner network, consult the partner section of our site.

Here are some tips for getting the most from the TAM Service:

1. Start early. Give your TAM time to understand your business goals, operational setup, and technological capabilities. This will help the TAM design the right solution for your particular needs.

2. Research first. We provide many resources to customers including 24/7 support and a vast help documentation site that together give you the knowledge and capabilities you need to solve many of your day-to-day issues. By taking advantage of these tools on your own, you will help focus the efforts of your TAM on the bigger, longer-term challenges you face.

3. Start with a flexible strategy. Our TAMs have a lot of experience and wisdom they can pass on to you. If you are open to new options, make it clear to your TAM that you want their advice. This can save you a lot of time and money in developing and deploying your solution.

To find out how you can sign up with the TAM Service, contact your account manager or read more about it in our mpsExperts section.

Written by: Nathan Rohm, Product Manager

Customer News - Blog"}

Community Toolkit in Action

Last year we introduced the Community Toolkit, which gives customers community-building features such as ratings, comments, tags, favorites, polls, and user accounts for their PDK players. Since then, our customers have found ways to integrate these features into their video web sites at an ever-increasing rate. Every day our system handles over 2.4 million ratings, over 1 million favorites lists, and more than 155 thousand user profile requests.

As Joey Lesh, Program Manager for the Community Toolkit put it, “One of the useful aspects of the Community Toolkit is its flexibility. Customers can place any combination of elements such as comments, ratings, tags, or favorites lists directly into players with the PDK plug-in components, or programmatically with the API. For example, we have some customers using ratings to power a ’1 to 5’ ratings system, and others using a ‘bump-style’ interface like those seen in Digg or Yahoo! Buzz.”

In addition to storing community activities for certain video content, the Community Toolkit also lets you use customer accounts to store demographic or other custom information. You can also integrate community features with other user account systems, giving your developers a lot more options for seamlessly integrating with your existing user management systems.

Cisco encourages interaction with community features

Cisco integrated a number of community features into their video submission site at digitalcribs.net. DiGiTAL CRiBS describes itself as a “new series about the human network and how we use consumer technology in new and exciting ways.” It features profiles of philanthropists and social leaders, student film submissions from leading film schools, and video from the general audience. The site has made extensive use of ratings, and comments in particular. Go to digitalcribs.net to see more.

Written by: Nathan Rohm, Product Manager

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High-performance digital transport for the global media supply chain

Written By: Francois Quereuil

Web audiences want high-resolution video content, and to meet this demand, media companies are relying on a multitude of new technologies to help them to deliver better content faster and more efficiently. File-based workflows and digital delivery have been a reality for many years in the media industry, but they’ve become more practical and cost effective since the recent availability of high-performance digital transport technologies.

Until recently, it was simply not practical to use conventional IP networks to effectively move video content in a time-constrained production environment. Traditional technologies such as FTP simply didn’t deliver the level of performance, security, and reliability that media production workflows require in order to move large volumes of digital assets between geographically distributed facilities for tasks such as initial capture, editing, post production, transformation, and final packaging.

Leading film studios, post-production companies, visual effects houses, and broadcasters have been looking at software file transfer solutions to reduce their production cycles and provide consumers with fast access to their best content. Using next-generation digital transport technologies offers them benefits that older technologies can’t by helping them:

• Transfer full-resolution masters, digital film reels, and high-definition Blu-ray Disc images in hours or even minutes on high-capacity networks, even globally.
• Avoid the notorious errors and time-consuming manual processing of shipping drives and tapes and the customs headaches of international deliveries.
• Fully automate media file ingest, transformation, and distribution with integrated transport, tracking, and management to prevent human error, increase security, accelerate time-to-market, and reduce cost.
• Avoid skyrocketing transfer fees from expensive dedicated networks or managed file delivery services.
• Receive breaking news and live event content reliably and on time from even the most remote field locations.
• Enjoy bulletproof protection of master content including transport encryption, data integrity, content storage, and user access control.

High-performance file transfer solutions are enabling file-based production workflows from start to finish, but they can also help media companies cope with the explosion of distribution outlets – including online video portals, video-on-demand services, IPTV and over-the-top Internet TV services – and audiences’ growing desire for more high-resolution media. Content creators, aggregators, and service providers have forged a complex supply chain in which file-based media is constantly created, repurposed, and distributed to global audiences. These companies now want to consolidate their monumental IT investments and leverage low-cost commodity IP networks to securely deliver high-resolution media worldwide without lowering quality of service. The adoption of high-performance file transfer technologies has become a key driver for these companies, enabling them to:

• Receive terabytes of file-based content per day, even from providers at global distances, with simplicity, high speed, and low cost.
• Reduce dependence on third-party distribution networks to cut cost and control quality while delivering a more personalized viewing experience.
• Consolidate the entire network with fewer origin servers, POPs, and edge servers, as content need not be served locally for high throughput.
• Facilitate the transition to all-digital operations, which can help increase productivity, minimize operational costs, expand revenues, and enable new business models.

For organizations that need to move large volumes of data over public and private IP networks, Aspera offers solutions that are easy to deploy, fully cross-platform, and file type and network type agnostic. A simple plug-in to thePlatform’s Remote Media Processor (RMP) connects a video publisher’s account in media publishing system (mps) with Aspera’s high-speed data transfer technology.

To find out more about how Aspera and thePlatform can increase the speed at which files move through your publishing workflow, see the Aspera partner page on thePlatform’s web site.

Francois Quereuil is Marketing Director at Aspera, Inc., and previously held senior marketing positions at digital audio and video production pioneer Avid in Europe and the United States.

Industry News and Viewpoints - Blog"}

What’s your TV Everywhere strategy?

Two business models, two technical decisions

The time has arrived to enable consumers to watch their favorite cable programs online. As of June 2009, a US audience of 157 million is waiting (comScore), and the business justifications for meeting their demands are clear:

• Adding value to cable subscription packages
• Tapping into the growing online video advertising opportunity, estimated at $5.8 billion in the U.S. by 2013 (eMarketer)
• Preventing piracy; in the absence of a viable, legitimate service, consumers may turn to alternative sources like BitTorrent to catch up on their favorite shows
• Eventually offering a subscription package to those customers who have canceled their cable TV in favor of viewing content through their broadband connection

Our goal is to help you get your TV Everywhere strategy to market as quickly and efficiently as possible. If you’d like to dive deeper on this topic, contact thePlatform for a briefing.

How do I start?

Getting started requires a few fundamental decisions.

What business model are you pursuing?

MSOs are deciding if they should enhance their own video portals with entitled video, work with cable networks to present premium videos on the network’s web site, or pursue both. A couple of the factors influencing business model decisions include the investment a MSO has in its existing video portal, and the desire to enhance the relationship with their customers.

On the other hand, one argument for enabling entitled video playback on the programmer web sites is that you can reach those sites’ audiences and avoid the cost of hosting a video site. The good news is that, in either scenario, the underlying technology can be the same, which brings us to the next set of decisions.

How will you authenticate users and respect subscription boundaries?

Today’s cable infrastructure knows about your house as defined by an account, but it doesn’t have a relationship with the people in the household. It also knows what channel a set-top box is allowed to access, but it doesn’t know what show is on. To figure out who’s watching what, the cable system can look at the channel that was watched at a particular time, and then use a TV guide service to figure out what show was on after the fact. This leads us to two technical decisions.

First up: how will we authenticate consumers against a valid account? The good news is that many MSOs have already built a billing system web adaptor that allows an authentication system to make web service calls to check a consumer’s credentials. To support authentication on the MSO’s video portal, a direct connection can be made between the web site and billing system web adaptor.

To enable authentication on programmer web sites, we believe a federated approach is the best for all parties. The MSO retains control over their customer relationship and validating credentials can be done in real time. For programmers working with multiple MSOs, an authentication proxy can be deployed to interact with the MSO’s various Auth standards.

The second technical decision: How will we ensure that the consumer is only watching content that falls under their subscription package and enforce the media rights agreed to by the MSO and cable network? Unlike the cable system, broadband video requires a hard link be set up between each video asset and the approved subscription package in advance of playback. Video management systems like thePlatform’s can establish this link and respect the airdates and geographic restrictions that are defined for each video. Stream encryption or digital rights management can be added to increase the security of this valuable media.

What’s next?

After the big decisions are made, there are lots of little ones. We recommend the following:

1. Start small. Define initial success with a trial to thousands of people. Learn from each stage and take an iterative approach to adding capabilities.
2. Use your existing assets. Between the web site and MSO’s billing system, there is a good foundation for extending both to meet the needs of this project.
3. Find a partner you trust. thePlatform has years of experience in this space and there are many good consultancies and vendors to help your organization through the decisions that need to be made.
4. Start today. Even with a narrow scope, these projects can take months to implement. By starting this project soon, you can ensure that your offering stays competitive with the rest of the market.

Our goal is to help you get your TV Everywhere strategy to market as quickly and efficiently as possible. If you’d like to dive deeper on this topic, contact thePlatform for a briefing.

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

Ingest Excel Spreadsheet Content with the Ingest Service Excel Adapter

Many of our customers manage their metadata with spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel. Excel provides a durable, transferable, and easy-to-use method for adding, editing, and removing metadata on large amounts of media content.

Ingesting media content stored in an Excel spreadsheet requires an adaptable approach. In Excel, every spreadsheet often has a unique column structure that may start with the video and the thumbnail file names, and then include a host of other important metadata items including video title, categories, tags, availability dates, long descriptions, target countries, and more. In each circumstance, nearly every customer has a unique way of structuring Excel columns and headings that map to their own work-flow and content requirements.

Introducing the Excel Ingest adapter

To help our customers take their unique Excel data organization and ingest their content directly into mps with minimal disruption to their workflows and business structures, we developed an Excel ingest adapter.

Using our Groovy script Excel adapter, mps takes in your Excel spreadsheet content and makes it available for delivery, including syndication to your media outlets and players. This process saves you time and effort by avoiding the need to manually convert your own Excel files into XML or MRSS. It also saves you the effort of building and maintaining your own scripts to handle the conversion processes. You can just use one of our Excel adapters and get the job done with the Ingest Service.

Steps to configure the Excel adapter

In order to use the Ingest Service Excel adapter, we recommend that you contact your Account Manager. Our team will work with you to configure the Ingest Service to work with our Watch Folder service, in which you set up an FTP location where you can drop updated Excel files that are ingested automatically into our system. We will then work with you to create a custom Groovy script that maps our system to your Excel spreadsheet’s column headings. Once this file is ready, it is added to the Ingest Service and you can begin dropping Excel files into your Watch Folder.

For more information, contact your account manager or visit the Technical Resource Center today for more information on the Ingest Service and the Excel adapter.

Service and Feature Updates - Blog"}

New Yahoo! Connector added to mpsConnect

Syndicating content to Yahoo!‘s vast media publishing network is now easier with our new Yahoo! Connector. This Connector helps customers deliver media files to Yahoo!‘s publishing properties including portal sites, video search indexes, mobile sites, and partner outlets. Just upload your file, and the Connector does the rest.

Easily publish to Yahoo!

Using our video publishing services and tools, our new Yahoo! Connector allows you to:

• Ingest your file with our Ingest Service by either dropping it into a Watch Folder or by adding it to a feed that our Feed Reader monitors
• Translate your metadata file format into Yahoo!‘s proprietary XML format
• Transcode your files to the varying outlets’ encoding specifications in both required and optional formats (including Windows Media and Flash)
• Publish your file directly to Yahoo!‘s outlets in a timely and efficient manner

Expand your syndication options

The Yahoo! Connector fits nicely with the whole suite of Connectors and syndication options that we offer with our mpsConnect service. Our other Connector outlets include AT&T, GoTV, MobiTV, QuickPlay, Comcast, Helio, MSN Video, YouTube, and iTunes.

You can also use feeds syndication to package up your files and deliver your video to sites such as Veoh, AOL, MySpace, and any other site that accepts standard XML or MRSS feeds. If you just want to syndicate your entire player, you can use our player syndication to deliver a complete video player experience to any site that will allow embedding. Wherever your content needs to go, we can help it get there.

Learn more about syndication

As with all of our Connectors, when you use the Yahoo! Connector, we take care of all the details. You provide the file and we’ll make sure it gets delivered properly. Learn more about our Connector, feed, and player syndication services on our mpsConnect page, or contact your Account Manager today for more details.

thePlatform in the press - Blog"}

Online Video and the Cloud - Ian Blaine’s guest feature in FierceOnlineVideo

Many professional media companies and content owners have their heads in the clouds these days – and for good reason. They are grappling with the best ways to build, operate or expand their broadband video businesses.
More of them are now talking about the notion of “cloud computing,” and how it can be applied to support the various elements required to run a broadband video site. The concept isn’t a new one, of course, but there are many important details that they need to explore. Before diving into this topic; however, let’s start with a common definition of cloud computing from Wikipedia, which defines it as “a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the ‘cloud’ that supports them.”

Read the rest of Ian’s article here.

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